TWiki Search Tricks

Using TWiki Search for Journal Entries

I picked this one up from Paul:Journal/WebHome .

The basic idea is quite simple: if you have an ongoing set of updates (link pages, blog entries, work notes, project notes, etc.), create small pages with a consistent and sortable naming scheme. Then create a 'master' page that uses formatted search to 'include' the most recently changed pages, in reverse chronological order. Here's a sample of the search to accomplish this:


%<nop>SEARCH{"^MyPage.*"
   web="Random"
   scope="topic"
   regex="on"
   nosearch="on"
   order="topic"
   reverse="on"
   nototal="on"
   limit="5"
   format="$text"}%

So in this example, you might have pages named MyPageYYYYMMDD, for example MyPage20120524. Then the search would select the most recent 5 such pages, based on page title, and display them.

To show the topics in order of their modification date, use order="modified" rather than order="topic" .

One note: the TWiki release of Dec 2001 and before do not support the format=$text option. To add the feature, modify Search.pm at around line 570 as follows:

   } elsif( $theFormat ) {
      # free format, added PTh 10 Oct 2001
      if( ! $text ) {
          ( $meta, $text ) = &TWiki::Store::readTopic( $thisWebName, $topic );
      }
      $tempVal =~ s/\$summary/&TWiki::makeTopicSummary( $text, $topic, $thisWebName )/geos;
      $tempVal =~ s/\$formfield\(\s*([^\)]*)\s*\)/getMetaFormField( $meta, $1 )/geos;
      $tempVal =~ s/\$pattern\(\s*(.*?\s*\.\*)\)/getTextPattern( $text, $1 )/geos;
      #
      # add the following line to get $text format to work
      $tempVal =~ s/\$text/$text/geos;
   } elsif( $noSummary ) {

The next step is to provide an easy way to create and edit the little pages. Again, Paul:Journal/LinksHome has a very nice way. You create a form with a button. The form action is to edit the page that corresponds to today's date. The SERVERTIME variable has just the right features for this. Here's an example:

<form name="new" action="% SCRIPTURLPATH%/edit% SCRIPTSUFFIX%/% WEB%/">
<input type="hidden" name="topic" size="40" value="MyPage% SERVERTIME{$year$mo$day}%" />
<input type="hidden" name="onlywikiname" value="on" />
<input type="hidden" name="topicparent" value="TWikiSearchTricks" />
<input type="submit" value=" Create/Edit Todays Entry " class="submitButton" />
</form>

In this example I inserted a space between the percent-sign and the following variable, to prevent variable expansion - if you copy/paste this, you'll need to get rid of the spaces.

You can accomplish the same result by hyperlinks, as in:


[[% SCRIPTURLPATH%/edit% SCRIPTSUFFIX%/% WEB%/MyPage% SERVERTIME{$year$mo$day}%][edit]]

-- DaleBrayden - 26 Aug 2003

b r a y d e n . o r g / Software

TWiki Search Tricks

Using TWiki Search for Journal Entries