This posting describes a Google Search Appliance Onebox module for searching an LDAP directory.
At my work I help administrate a Google Search Appliance. It is used index the university’s website. The Appliance includes a functionality — called Onebox — allowing you to search multiple indexes and combining the results into a single Web page. It is sort of like libraray metasearch.
In an effort to make it easier for people to find… people, we created a Onebox module, and you can download the distribution if you so desire. It is written in Perl.
In regards to libraries and librarianship, the Onebox technique is something the techno-weenies in our profession ought to consider. Capture the user’s query. Do intelligent processing on it by enhancing it, sending it to the appropriate index, making suggestions, etc., and finally returning the results. In other words, put some smarts into the search interface. You don’t need a Google Search Appliance to do this, just control over your own hardware and software.
From the distribution’s README file:
This distribution contains a number of files implementing a Google Onebox “widget”. It looks people’s names up in an LDAP directory.
The distribution contains the following files:
- people.cgi – the reason de existance
- people.pl – command-line version of people.cgi
- people.png – an image of a person
- people.xsl – XSL to convert people.cgi output to HTML
- README – this file
- LICENSE – the GNU Public License
The “widet” (people.cgi) is almost trivial. Read the value of the query paramenter sent as a part of the GET request. Open up a connection to the LDAP server. Query the server. Loop through the results keeping only a number of them as defined by the constant UPPER. Mark-up the results as Google XML. Return the XML to the HTTP client. It is then the client’s resposibility to transform the XML into an HTML (table) snippet for display. (That is what people.xsl is for.)
This widget ought to work in many environments. All you really need to do is edit the values of the constants at the beginning of people.cgi.
This code is distributed under the GNU Public License.
Enjoy.