addedValues Plugin

Index this Value?

Indexing a value makes it possible to ask questions involving that variable. In addedValues, a question is a search form or a query. Only indexed variables can be the object of searches (or queries). Broadly speaking having an index allows answering a question without having to examine every message (in a websites discussion group) or every gem (uploaded to a website) and so on. It is a data structure built in a way to make searches fast. See Why the addedValue Plugin is Important for an introduction to this topic.

You can index almost every variable type except row placeholders and computed variables. You may index builtin variables after they are defined. Multiple valued variables are also permitted to be indexed. There's an overhead associated with maintaining an index, so its best not to set indexing on until you need to use the variable in a form or query.

There are 2 flavours of indexing, normal indexing and text indexing. For example, you might want to index a message variable called keywords because this will allow to ask questions such as, what messages have a keyword value of "films"? But if there were a message variable called description, indexing several paragraphs of text describing the latest Harry Potter saga, isn't going to be a useful index. On the other hand, tell me about messages with keywords "films" and whose description contains "magic" might be. In other words,we need to index individual words of the text value of description for it to be useful. That's Text Indexing