stettler@cohprog.com wrote:

>Not realy : it's much more flexible if you do it outside than
>inside of SWISH. Think to the following cases :
>- You want to print the result in reverse order
>- You want to be able to display the total number of result
>- You want to display a list of pages so that it's possible to jump
>  directly to one or another...
>  (Ie :  Page : 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 -> next  ).
>  All this is trivial in the outside program. But doing it inside
>  SWISH would simply made it impossible to customize without modifing
>  the core program.

All of these features could be implemeted in the CGI even if swish-e could
be called with a -S skip function.
- Print results in reverse order would be tricky.  You'd need to call
swish-e once with a maxhits of zero to get the number of total hits.  Once
you have that number, it'd be easy to call using a maxhits of Number of
Results and a skip of Number of Results - n then outputting the results in
a descending loop.  For this feature I'd choose not to use the skip option.
- The total number of results is available in the returned comments.
- Displaying links to next hits would be as easy as parsing the Number of
Results from the comments and looping through the link output, incrementing
skip and maxhits by n for each.

>What you need is a good front-end to SWISH-E. (better than the current
>demo script). It can be included in the distribution. It can be
>writen in C if you want.

That's true enough, but from the perspective of someone helping to develop
an interface to swish-e that supports multiple pages, it would be a LOT
easier if I could just tell swish-e to skip the first n results.

>But it doesn't make sense to add those features inside of SWISH itself.

For me it does.  It makes the work a lot easier for the end user writing
custom interface scripts.  It would be OPTIONAL; no need to use it if you
don't want to.

I don't want to see the swish-e code cluttered with special-case options
that are only of use to a couple people, but I feel that this change would
be of user to quite a few users.

Thanks,
Jason
--
  Jason Birch - jason@pssltd.com
  GIS Applications Programmer / System Admin
  Pacific Spatial Systems Ltd. (www.pssltd.com)
  Ph: 250.756.9831     Fx: 250.756.9840