Author's Note: This documentation is a work in progress and should be considered preliminary please contact me with your comments. Paul Rubin
FlexSearch
Introduction:
FlexSearch is a flexible tool for web servers that only use Perl. It is intended to give database like capabilities for data sets where millions of records are not required. There are many major databases which are complicated to set up and maintain, FlexSearch is designed to be easy and quick.
A FlexSearch database is created from a list of fields, all fields are treated as variable length fields which can contain any type of data and an ASCII file of data. Any field can be indexed, once indexed, searches can be preformed on this field. When a database query is preformed the FlexSearch tool will merge the selected data with template HTML pages. The final HTML page is then returned to the user’s browser.
A single Perl script program contains all of the functions for both maintenance and use of the database files. The determination of what actions to take are determined by the fields passed to the script from the browser. There is even functionality to upload a database files and templates to the script from a browser, no ftp required.
Before you procede you should have a good working knowledge of HTML. It is possible to to use FlexSearch without a working knowledge, but much of this document will be very difficult to understand.