THL Toolbox > Developers' Zone > Searching Issues
Searching Issues
Contributor(s): Robbie Bingler, Than Grove
Topics on This Page:
| Searching Catalogs | Tibetan Dictionary Search Forms |
|---|
Searching THL Literature Catalogs from the Outside
Each of the catalogs in the THL Literary Encyclopedia (
http://www.thlib.org/encyclopedias/literary/) has its own search form from which one can search that particular catalog or the index of all texts. However, these search forms are within the catalog itself and rely heavily on Javascript and Ajax. So, it was not immediate possible to reverse engineer them into a GET call to perform a search from outside the catalog itself, either from another place within THL or from another site altogether. This issue has been address so it is now possible to call up a search on the catalogs. (Note: A true RESTful API where one can retrieve the data for a text in XML format through a URL still needs to be implemented and documented.)
The code that is now active on THL uses PHP to detect a param variable in the URL, creates a cookie of the query, and then redirects to the standard catalog URL. The JS in the catalog then detects the cookie and redirects to a subroutine that makes the search call and loads the results. For the record this involved changes to literary/canons/kt/catalog.php and literary/js/thl-catalog-controller.js. In its present inchoate state, the search param is called "q", and one can search for either Wylie or Tibetan. An example would be:
http://www.thlib.org/encyclopedias/literary/canons/kt/catalog.php?q=chos
or
http://www.thlib.org/encyclopedias/literary/canons/kt/catalog.php?q=ཆོས་
Note: Right now this is only available for the Kangyur-Tengyur catalog, but it will be implemented for other collections as well. The collection being searched is determined by the URL for the catalog.php page. The presently available collections are:
- Kangyur Tengyur: http://www.thlib.org/encyclopedias/literary/canons/kt/catalog.php
- Nyingma Gyubum: http://www.thlib.org/encyclopedias/literary/canons/ngb/catalog.php
- Dingo Khyentse's Collected Works: http://www.thlib.org/encyclopedias/literary/shechen/dkcw/catalog.php
The available parameters in the search call are:
| Param | Values | Meaning |
|---|---|---|
| q | (any search string) | The string to search for in the records |
| scope | [text|bibl] | Whether to search in digital texts or in the catalog bibliographic records |
| srchscope | [all|coll|ed] | Whether to search in all collections, the present collection being searched, or a specific edition |
| ed | (the sigla for the edition being searched) | This is not yet implemented but would be "d" or "tb", etc. |
Search Forms for the Tibetan Dictionary
To make the search form work in any THL page, we use the following fields:
- <input type="text" name="term">Term
- <input type="hidden" name="mode" value="search"
- <input type="radio" name="search_field" value="tibetan" checked>Tibetan Unicode Script
- <input type="radio" name="search_field" value="wylie" >THL Wylie Transliteration
- <input type="radio" name="search_field" value="phonetic" >THL Phonetic Transcription
- <input type="radio" name="search_type" value="exact" >exact match
- <input type="radio" name="search_type" value="beginning" >starts with
- <input type="radio" name="search_type" value="anywhere" checked>contains
The action is a POST to:
http://trinity.village.virginia.edu/THDLDictionary/definitions/find_head_terms