Domgle is a Domino based multi database search application written by Julien Bottemanne which utilises AJAX technology. I talked about Domgle briefly over on merauderweb a while back when it was still in Beta. Since then Domgle has been released up to 1.1 and has now become an OpenNTF project.
I think there are going to be a couple of distinctly different groups of people who will be interested in Domgle;
- People who have a need for context sensitive web searches in their Domino environment
- Domino developers who want to play with a bit of AJAX
Domgle uses google syntax for all searches (although this is configurable), which is something that users are used to (compared to Notes searching, where you need to manually specify the AND operator between each of your search terms). It's easy to configure and is pretty lightweight. I like the fact that you supply your own list of databases, and that you can supply a different host name for each one - something which will be great for large distributed environments. The code is easy to work with, so if you don't like some of the default behaviour you can just change it. I'm now using a private Domgle portal to search through some of my personal databases, and it's working really well. Some people might find the fact that you need to specify which databases you wish to search in the setup as a downside, however the fact that it allows you to create a series of different search contexts actually makes it quite powerful. Consider a company which offers an external portal to it's staff as well as an external portal for customers - you could easily offer each of those sites a seperate Domgle, and configure it to point at different subsets of databases. I've used the domain catalog before, and found it overly cumbersome. Compared to that, Domgle is a joy to setup and use. It's also nice to see AJAX being used with Domino, hopefully something we'll see more and more of this year.
I've made a couple of modifications and fixes to Domgle in my environment, some of which are worth mentioning quickly.
First, there are a couple of little typo issues in the 1.1 release which is on OpenNTF at the time of writing. These result in a few server console errors. My server console is usually pretty clean so I wanted these tidied up quickly. The first is that the Settings page has a reference to a non existant stylesheet, global.css. I simply created a blank StyleSheet in my Domgle database to get rid of this - you could of course remove the reference if you prefer. Next, there's another typo around the search activity indicator on the main search form:
Simply add the missing quotation mark to fix this. Only minor issues, but if you like having a clean server console then you might as well fix them up.
Next, there's a quick code fix to the search agent posted on OpenNTF: Bug and possible fix in search agent. The bug means that if you're adding custom field names, and then search on databases which don't contain those fields, then the search will fail. This fix will be included in the next release, and is worth making if you've downloaded 1.1.
Finally, I changed the Search form so that the default focus is given to the search term textbox. It's a simple change, but having to click in the box every time was a bit annoying. I did mine quickly with a Simple hack, added to the Body Properties of the search form:
"onload='javascript:document.forms[1].SearchString.focus()'"
However, if you wanted you could do it properly using a JavaScript function, there's plenty of examples out there, just search for 'set focus'.
Something I might consider doing later is implementing a set of common fields in all of my databases. For example, making sure every document has a 'Title' field with the same name, regardless of the template of the database it resides in. This means that you can tell Domgle to include this field in it's search, giving you the ability to display a standard looking result set even though your databases mat be radically different. Also, if you're running Domgle across non public databases and you're using multiple server names or multiple URLs assigned to the same server then you'll need to make sure you have your servers configured to pass your authentication details across sites. Otherwise the search will simply sit there when it hits a site you haven't authenticated against - I've added a couple of new domains to my Domino server lately, and this is something I apparently haven't had time to look at yet!
For those who are interested, Julien has provided a quick diagram of how it all works:
Link: OpenNTF: Domgle
Link: Domlink.net: The home of Domgle