Thunderstone Search Appliance Manual

Field Types

Each Parametric Search field must also have a specific type. Choose a type from the Type column, based on the data that you wish to populate the field and how it will be searched. The available types are:

• Date A date and time (local time zone unless otherwise noted). Various formats are accepted for input, including (optional parts in square brackets):

  • YYYY-MM-DD HH:MM:SS

  • Month DD[,] [[YY]YY] [HH:MM[:SS]]

  • DD Month [[YY]YY] [HH:MM[:SS]]

  • Weekday [HH:MM[:SS]]

  • YYYY-MM-DDTHH:MM:SSZ

  • start of Month [[YY]YY]

  • end of Month [[YY]YY]
  Most formats also support an optional timezone specifier at the end; one of GMT, EST, EDT, CST, CDT, MST, MDT, PST, PDT. When output (e.g. in XML), the format of Date fields is YYYY-MM-DD HH:MM:SS (in local time).

• Integer A signed 32-bit integer value. Decimal or hexadecimal (with 0x prefix) is accepted for input; decimal is always output.

• Number A double-precision floating-point (i.e. fractional) number, e.g. 123.456 or -4.789e+109.

• Text A text value. These may be searched with exact-match (equals) as well as free-form keyword search (ala main text search). While there is no pre-set size limit to Text fields, if they are to be searched with an operator other than text search (i.e. exact-match equals), the value sizes should be kept to a minimum for index performance.

• Set A set of zero or more unique text strings. These may be searched with exact-match (equals), which is true if the given value is a member of the set, or free-form keyword search (ala main text search). Added in version 5.01.1226018000 20081106.

• Enum   A short, case-insensitive text identifier; one of a limited set of possible values for the entire profile. For example, a color, car model or pizza topping, where there are only a finite number of distinct colors, models or toppings in the whole profile's data. Enum values are stored internally as integers, enabling increased search performance in some situations when indexed as a Compound Index Field. There is a slight performance decrease at walk time however, due to management of the integer/string mapping table. Thus an Enum field is typically only used instead of a Text field in situations where there are a limited number of distinct values, and search performance in conjunction with a keyword query is important. They can be searched for with exact-match (equals); relational (less-then/greater-than) operators are also supported, but as the internal integer ordering is used, results may not always match the expected string/alphabetical order. See here for more on the Enum type.

• GMLPoint   A geographic point, specified as a space- or comma-separated latitude/longitude pair (in that order). Each is given in decimal degrees (e.g. 80.75 for 80 degrees 45 minutes 00 seconds). Negative numbers represent south latitudes and west longitudes; alternatively, an N or S suffix (for latitudes) or E or W suffix (for longitudes) may be given. Since both latitude and longitude are stored together for faster searching, the resolution accuracy for a GMLPoint field is 32 seconds or 0.008888 degrees (about half a mile).

When all Parametric Search field names and types have been entered, hit Create Profile to create the profile with those fields. The next step is configuring how to populate them with data.