Implementing Empress Wrapper for Whoosh in Empress

Introduction

Welcome to this comprehensive guide on Empress Wrapper for Whoosh, an essential feature in Empress. As developers, this feature allows you to manage and manipulate the search index of your documents efficiently. This guide will explore the backend functionalities of this feature and show you how to seamlessly integrate it into your workspace.

Understanding the Feature

Empress Wrapper for Whoosh is a powerful tool that wraps the Whoosh library, a fast, featureful full-text indexing and searching library implemented in pure Python. It provides a series of methods that facilitate the creation, update, and removal of documents from the search index, as well as the ability to perform searches within the index.

Let’s delve into the technical details of the methods available with this feature.

Key Methods

update_index_by_name(self, doc_name)

This method wraps the update_index method and updates the index for a document specified by its name. It modifies the current user context and should only be executed by an administrator or as part of a background job. The parameters include:

  • self (object): An instance of FullTextSearch
  • doc_name (str): The name of the document to be updated
def update_index_by_name(self, doc_name):
    # implementation

remove_document_from_index(self, doc_name)

This method removes a document from the search index. The parameters are:

  • self (object): An instance of FullTextSearch
  • doc_name (str): The name of the document to be removed
def remove_document_from_index(self, doc_name):
    # implementation

update_index(self, document)

This method updates the search index for a document. The parameters are:

  • self (object): An instance of FullTextSearch
  • document (_dict): A dictionary with title, path, and content
def update_index(self, document):
    # implementation

build_index(self)

This method builds an index for all parsed documents.

def build_index(self):
    # implementation

search(self, text, scope=None, limit=20)

This method conducts a search within the current index. The parameters include:

  • text (str): The string to search for
  • scope (str, optional): An optional scope to limit the search. Defaults to None.
  • limit (int, optional): An optional limit on the number of search results. Defaults to 20.

It returns a list of dictionaries representing the search results.

def search(self, text, scope=None, limit=20):
    # implementation

Conclusion

In this guide, we explored the Empress Wrapper for Whoosh feature in Empress, a tool that provides you with a powerful suite of methods to manage your search index. This feature is crucial for developers as it provides the capabilities to create, update, remove, and search documents in your search index, thereby enhancing the functionality and customization of your business solutions.