ExternalSearch

[Ehtyar]

This plug-in is designed to facilitate, in a very basic way, integration of external applications with the searching capabilities of FARR. It is designed with programmers in mind to allow for quick and painless integration. With it, you can instruct FARR to perform searches on your application's behalf with a string you specify, via the FARRT library (yes this name is a joke). The complete readme is attached.

PLEASE NOTE: This plug-in, in its current form, is not of any significant use to the FindAndRunRobot user. It is for the programmer wishing to interface his application with FARR. If you have any feature requests etc please let me know. It is my intention to add new ways to interface your program with FARR to this plug-in.

ExternalSearch - Plug-in Only

ExternalSearch - Plug-in w/ source & demo of integration w/ source in C.

Ehtyar.

[mouser]

This is a realllllllly cool plugin.
People might figure out other requests for things to be added as well -- it's sort of an advanced thing, so it might be a while before people come up with ways to use this, but i think this has great potential.

Maybe some communication in the other direction could be useful too -- like a way for a program to be notified whenever the user searches, launches, or selects something in FARR.

[Code6226]

Great idea... I was looking for something like this... but it's still too complicated.

With this, you still have to be a C++ coder to use the "external Search" functionality, the very thing I was hoping to avoid but not writing my own plugin in the first place.

What I really need is a way to do this:

Something that pre-loads a text file list. So a "list.txt" that looks like so:

[Select]

Bart
Homer
Marge
Lisa

It also would let people define the command/alias that invokes it, so let's say I chose "simp".
The users type "simp e", and it obviously shows in the thus-far results:

[Select]

Homer
Marge

The user wanted "Homer", which is the first thing now, so he hits Enter.

At this point, the plugin would call "something.exe" with the parameter "Homer", and be done.

The person using your plugin to make their own "External search" could thereby easily make the "something.exe" in any language they wanted (Yay for not needing to use C++), and that program could do whatever was appropriate. Or they could just call some Batch files this way. Imagine the awesome possibilities of having "Suggested" parameters.

So just let people define:
1) The list's path: "list.txt" by default
2) The list's format: (Just a list), or maybe (a list with Icon path and Description, seperated with tokens). Ex:

[Select]

Homer@He's a [email protected]
Marge@That's a [email protected]

3) Path of the program/batch file to run, and where to put the user-chosen parameter (perhaps allow "something.bat -AddToFavorites $$1" where $$1 is the sole parameter [like Homer] or what-not)

Having an extension like this would be INCREDIBLY USEFUL for any number of things, and the best part for its users: NO PROGRAMMING REQUIRED. 


EDIT: After reading the "Request plugins for FARRv2" thread, it seems about 4 or so other people asked for things very similar to what I'm describing here, and Mouser already said something of the sort would be in the FARRv3 or so.

For now, I think I can pull off what I want using using the build-in "dosearch" alias helper.