Adding a Remote Search Form and Putting All Search Forms on Tabs

Date	2010/10/25
Contact(s)	List of author(s).
Last edited
Status	draft, in progress, near complete
Assigned to release	Release number, to be determined
Resources	Available

Overview

GeoNetwork has long had Z3950 support but the remote search form was dropped with the introduction of 2.2 - probably because the Z3950 implementation was old and because 'Remote Search' didn't seem to fit in the new observer layout being used for minimaps etc. This proposal will add the remote search form back into the GeoNetwork interface (under the heading 'Distributed Search' as both the local node and remote nodes can be searched in the remote search form). To properly support the addition of this search form, it is also proposed to place the 'default' (or simple search) and the advanced search forms on tabs. The tabs can be styled as the user requires but the default styling would look as follows:

Proposal Type

• Type: GUI Change
• App: GeoNetwork
• Module: Search Interface

Links

• Documents:
• Email discussions:
• Other wiki discussions:

Voting History

• Not yet proposed for voting.

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Motivations

A remote/distributed search form complements the existing simple and advanced search forms as well as the Z3950 and CSW harvesters. It allows users to search remote nodes in conjunction with the local GeoNetwork node.

The Z3950 api in GeoNetwork has been recently upgraded to JZKit-3. This api is the current version of JZKit and although it is much more complex than JZKit-1, it should be better supported.

Proposal

Work done is as follows:

• Restructure main-page.xsl to support tabs for search forms and creation of remote/distributed minimap
• Extent and refactor gn_search.js to include processing of remote/distributed search form
• Refactor and extend OL minimap support for three minimaps (simple, advanced and remote/distributed) that are kept in sync (ol_minimaps.js)
• Alter searchform_advanced.xsl to present both the advanced and the remote/distributed search forms (since much of the content is duplicated)
• Alter search-results-xhtml.xsl because results returned by the remote search cannot be manipulated in as many ways as those returned by a simple or advanced search on the local node. The following shows a typical remote results search:

Backwards Compatibility Issues

None known - Remote/Distributed search tab can be config'd off if required in config-gui.xml

New libraries added

saxon-dom-9.1.0.8b.jar - to allow remote nodes to supply an HTML rendering of the page

Risks

None known.

Participants

• Simon Pigot - CSIRO, Craig Jones - eMii/IMOS/UTAS