I have a Solaris box hosting 3 websites, each of which has a unique
swish-e index file.  I'd like to make a SELECT box that will look
something like this:

<select name="si">
  <option value="">Search All Sites
  <option value="0">Search Corporate Site
  <option value="1">Search Customer Site
  <option value="2">Search Support Site
</select>

The idea here is that customers can choose to search through the
contents of a single site, or select NO index in order to search
through all sites.

To accomplish that, I made a select_indexes directive like this in my
.swishcgi.conf file:

  select_indexes => {
    description => 'Select Something: ',
    default_index => [ qw(
      /usr/local/lib/swish-e/indexes/site1.index
      /usr/local/lib/swish-e/indexes/site2.index
      /usr/local/lib/swish-e/indexes/site3.index
    )]
  }

That way, the default index is actually all 3 indexes.  (I don't have
any method, columns, labels, etc. directives in the select_indexes hash
because I'm creating my own search page using the HTML code listed
above).

Now this idea works fine if I'm using, say, checkboxes.   e.g.

<input type="checkbox" name="si" value="0">Search Corporate Site
<input type="checkbox" name="si" value="1">Search Corporate Site
<input type="checkbox" name="si" value="2">Search Corporate Site

If no checkboxes are selected, no "si" variable gets passed into
swish.cgi, and the default_index(es) kick in just like I want. 

However, if I use the <SELECT> box code listed at the top of this page
(and select "Search All Sites"), then the code breaks, and I get a
"Index file error: Could not open the index file 'index.swish-e': No
such file or directory" error.

I've discovered this is because selecting a "null" value <option> in a
<select> box creates a GET request that contains "si=" .  The Perl CGI
module interprets this as a null value, and dutifully populates the
"si" array with a single (null) value.  And that's not the same thing
as having NO "si" value at all.  Since "si" has a null value, swish-e
doesn't bother using the default_index(es).

My kludge to work around this so far has been to edit swish.cgi (2.4.0
release version) and change line 1382 from:

    if ( !@choices ) {

to:

    if ( !@choices  || ($#choices == 0 && !$choices[0])) {

It's a ugly hack, but at the moment it's the only way I know how to
accomplish what I want to do.  Does anyone have a better suggestion how
I could tackle this problem?

Thanks!

=====

=-=-= David =-=-=




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