There are a few things I would like to change in the interface client you've created, however I'm not exactly very familiar with web design
If the usage of an Internet browser is not an requirement, you can use any other development environment to create your own custom PDFE web interface client, e.g. to even create a stand alone desktop application.
Perhaps you can recommend a tool that can help?
I've used the
Spket IDE.
What I would like to change is:
1. set defaults for search options, such as
- number of items per page
- the type of view (grid, grid with thumbnails, thumbnails only)
2. Play around with the layout a bit (reader open from the start)
3. Add search functions:
- search the search results
- search by specific metadata field
To make these changes you need to know/learn JavaScript, and familiarize yourself with the
ExtJS framework.
If you want to try, install the ExtJS 3.4 (this current client is not compatible with the last ExtJS 4.x versions), at the "C:\MySite\wwwroot\extjs", and make these changes editing the .js files at the "C:\MySite\wwwroot\js\debug" folder, specially the index.js. Check the changes browsing the index-debug.html, instead of the index.html one (e.g. localhost/index-debug.html)
But if you are not used to this, I would recommend that you start coding your client from scratch, using the last version of the ExtJS framework, and an ExtJS GUI designer. Use my sample client only as a source to better understand the usage of the PDFEWI API.
- rank the search using any available metric; at the moment the results are sorted by alphabetical order in the of filename and (sub)directories. Is there a way to rank by number of hits per document?
You can sort clicking the grid columns, and obviously you can use only the available data. "Hits per document" is not a field provided by PDFE, so you can only implement that functionality if you use a server side way to save/access that data. This can be easily achieved with a php server side script that acts as a proxy to the client requests.
4. Is there a way to pass the searched terms to Acrobat Reader's advanced search? Acrobat's advanced search will show the actual page and sentence-context when searching.
For Acrobat, check this
http://partners.adobe.com/public/developer/en/acrobat/PDFOpenParameters.pdfYou can use the searched terms to construct the url used to show the PDF, for results returned for indexed text content searches.
