I am implementing an eCommerce application using ASP.Net. I would like to know if custom Google search is sufficient enough or if we plan to go implement our search functionality.. how do we go about doing it?
Ideas and Suggestions and best practices are most welcome.
Regards,
Abdel Olakara
If you don't plan on using Google Search then you really have 2 options:
If you are using SQL Server you can put all of your site text into ntext or varbinary fields so that it is search-able. Then if you have files like PDFs etc you can put the files into a table as varbinary and create a Full Text Catalog to search them. For PDFs you will need to have iFilter installed, it is part of the free Adobe Reader package. There are other iFilters. Check out http://www.ifilter.org/ for more info on them.
If you are using asp.net hosted on a windows server you can use the Windows Indexing Service and put any of the data that you want into text file or any other file format. You might still need iFilters for those formats.
I would suggest option 1 if you don't go with Google. It can be a little more complex but option 2 can have the issue that everything starts to look like it is being saved in a giant heap. You can also do some combination of 1 and 2.
You might like to look at Lucene.NET http://lucene.apache.org/lucene.net/
I have spent many years implementing search engines and using an established 3rd Party tool like Lucene will save you a lot of heartache. There are many, many gotchas and edge cases with searching. These have been dealt with to a large degree in Lucene.
As I read it, Custom Google Search is about searching web pages in your site. Contrast this with searching database contents such as lists of products or reviews of items.
What are your requirements? My guess is that when I go to an eCommerce site (eg. Amazon or something such as Trip Advisor) I want to search content that is stored in databases. So I'm doubtful that this particular Google capability fits my expectations of eCommerce.
Related
I'm looking for the best way to achieve the following workflow.
Ask a series of questions
Captured the responses
Use the answers captured to either hide or show certain aspects of word document.
Save the complete word document to a location (TBD).
I'm not a developer, so will need to source one who could pick this up, but before I do I wanted to know the best approach to this workflow.
Appreciate any feedback you can offer.
Cheers
There are several libraries for interacting with Word (.docx) documents in C#, such as NPOI and DocX, and it is not theoretically complicated to programatically populate a document based on user input and some decision tree and then save it somewhere locally or expose it for download via a web interface. But, keep in mind, that's only part of the solution -- apps have to be hosted, secured, monitored, etc., and that's where the "hard" part is likely to be.
If you are looking to accomplish this within an enterprise environment that uses Microsoft Office 365, you may not need a developer at all. Microsoft Flow / Microsoft PowerAutomate allows you to produce complex workflows such as the one you described. There's a very similar one listed here:
https://flow.microsoft.com/en-us/galleries/public/templates/3c651e28cded46aab2ba40a2c3116f30/create-word-and-pdf-documents-from-microsoft-forms/
Is there a way to programatically upload an image file to search in Google, and then downloading the first one (the one with best resolution)?
EDIT: The Google Search API would not work for me, as I would have much more than 100 requests per day, and I am not willing to pay, since I am not a company
Yes, there is. The Google Custom Search API allows you to submit queries (including images) and retrieve results programmatically. There are even client libraries available for multiple languages.
EDIT: After OP changed his question, basically saying that he doesn't want to use the Google API, I can only refer to this(a bit outdated) question and quote the Google Terms of Service:
1.4 Appropriate Conduct. You shall not, and shall not allow any third party to: ... (i) directly or indirectly generate queries, or
impressions of or clicks on Results, through any automated, deceptive,
fraudulent or other invalid means (including, but not limited to,
click spam, robots, macro programs, and Internet agents);
So to recap, it is possible, but it is only legal via the API I linked above.
I need to get information from couple of web sites . For example this site
What would be the best way to get all the links from the page so that the information could be extracted.
Some times need to click on a link to get other links inside that.
I tried Watin and I tried doing the same from within Excel 2007 with Web Data option.
Could you please suggest some better way which I am not aware of .
Ncrawler might be very useful for the deep level crawling . You could also set the MaxCrawlDepth for specifying the same.
Have a look at WGet. It is an incredibly powerful tool for mining the content of a single page or an entire website. The options available allow you to dictate how many levels deep to follow in terms of links, what to do with static resources such as images, how to handle relative links, etc. It also does a very good job of mining pages which are generated dynamically, such as those served by CGI or ASP.
It's been around for many years in the 'nix world but executables compiled for Windows are readily available.
You would need to kick it off from .NET using Process.Start but you could then pipe the results into multiple files (which mimic the original website structure), a single file, or into memory by capturing standard output. Then you can do subsequent analysis such as extracting HREF HTML elements (if it is only links you are interested in) or grabbing the sort of table data evident in the link you provide in your question.
I realise this is not a 'pure' .NET solution but the power WGET offers more than compensates for this, in my opinion. I have used it myself in the past, in this way, for exactly the sort of thing I think you are trying to do.
I recommend to use http://watin.org/. This is much simpler than wget :-)
I would like to have a lot of data (quotes of famous people, arround 100 k quotes). And I want that users are able to search, sort on category and sort on authors.
Got a big big xml file at the moment, but what is smart to do? How can i get all the quotes in the app? maybe a sql lite database? or just loop the xml when app starts?
Any tips are most welcome!
Kevin
UPDATE: Thanks for all the replies and tips, I really appreciate it and I am looking forward to program my App, did make a runkeeper-like app yesterday, now starting the quotes app.
I would recommend storing this data on a webserver somewhere and using some SOAP interface of something like this, to access it. I wouldn't be positively surprised when a downloaded application all of a sudden decides to download a big file of quotes.
I would recommend a SQL CE database (.sdf file)
Great overview here: http://windowsphonegeek.com/tips/Windows-Phone-Mango-Local-Database%28SQL-CE%29-Introduction
And here: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/hh202860%28v=VS.92%29.aspx
There's no SQLite on WP7. There's SQL Server Compact though. Read up on the latter, and also on LINQ. WP7.5 only.
Alternatively, store data on the Web server, and use a service to pull it on demand. In that case, read up on services and SOAP.
With the fact that you are looking at a 500mb file I think you have a couple of options.
1) Put all of this data in a database on a webserver, then have your phone application use whatever method you like to contact the database to get specific data that is needed. Obviously your UI would have to be optimised to allow a user to sort by the type of quote and / or the person to whom the quote is attributed.
2) If you want this to be done without the use of the webserver you could have a stripped down basic database of quotes in the application itself, to extend this connect to the database and download more data.
This method may be best as it lets you use the database data to say populate a website if you wanted to (make a bit of money from ad revenue / promote your app) and also it means if your users dont have an internet connection they can still get some use from your app.
Without more knowledge of the platform I couldnt say what would happen if you try load a 500mb application but I doubt it would be good, though having such a large file locally is a bad idea for a mobile device. I can see this going two ways.
1) Im out and see your application, I set it downloading, pay it no attention and then later check to find it has downloaded 500mb over my mobile phone data package. This could mean a big bill.
2) I start to download your application, it hasnt finished downloading after 10mins, I delete it and dont bother trying again.
You can do something like let the user to enter three character minimum before search from webservice ans user the service result to bind the data.
Check the following links
How to connect to a Webservice from a Windows Mobile Device 6.0
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa446547.aspx
Let me know if this helps.
I am developing a ASP.NET web site where users will need to be able to create their own business cards. So, I'm looking for a tool (most likely Flash) that I can easily integrate into a web site and lets users add text and custom images to their cards and then create an image and/or PDF from their work.
is there a plugin that does this?
If you write your own business-card creator in flash, you can save the view to PDF files using AlivePDF.
You could have a look at this: http://www.shirtnetwork.com/en
It is less of a plugin and much more of a fully customizable software solution, with an administration backend, PDF export, billing etc. . I worked on the client and I must say it is a very mature and potent software and probably can do about anything you want, when it comes to customizing products. I don't know, whether you like the pricing model, OTOH to my knowledge, they also provide provision-free licences.
I don't know, whether there are reasonbly expensive components available, that do this for you, because you can get a load of money out of this business, so I wouldn't expect anyone to give them away for free.
greetz
back2dos