dtisapi6.dll

dtSearch Web is an ISAPI DLL, dtisapi6.dll, that works with Microsoft Internet Information Server version 4 or later.  (Other web servers, even if they are ISAPI-compliant, will not work with dtSearch Web.)

Searching

The search request web page contains an HTML form with input fields specifying the index to be searched, the search request, and search features such as stemming, phonic searching, etc.  For a list of the form variables in the search form, see "The Search Form."

When the user clicks the Submit button on the search form, your web server sends the form data to dtisapi6.dll using the Common Gateway Interface (CGI) and Microsoft's ISAPI interface.  dtisapi6.dll performs the search using the dtSearch Engine (dten600.dll) and returns HTML search results.

Limiting Searches

The maxFiles form element determines how many documents will be returned from a search.  For example, if you set this to 25, dtSearch Web will return the best-matching 25 documents. 

You can also limit the total number of files found in a search, using the autoStopLimit.  While maxFiles allows the entire search to complete and then returns the best-matching files, autoStopLimit halts the search if it finds too many files and returns the partial results.  AutoStopLimit can be useful for very large document collections.  Example: A document collection contains 1,000,000 documents on banking, nearly all of which include the word "bank".  A search for "bank" could take a long time because dtSearch would have to count the number of hits in each of the 1,000,000 documents to find the best-matching files.  Setting AutoStopLimit to 5000 would halt the search after it had found 5000 matching files. 

Viewing Documents

The HTML search results returned by dtisapi6.dll contain links back to the server site that enable the user to view retrieved documents with hits highlighted.  The HREF in each link invokes dtisapi6.dll as follows:

     HREF="dtisapi6.dll?cmd=getdoc&doc=<doc info> &hits=34+68"

The text after the ? indicates a CGI query.  The elements of the query are separated by the & character and punctuation marks are URL-encoded -- %3a = colon (":"), %5c = backslash ("\"), %2e = period (".").  The + represents a space. 

Retrieved documents appear in the user's web browser as they would in the dtSearch end-user product, with basic formatting (italics, underlining, bold, centering, indentation, etc.) preserved and hits highlighted.