Have to dvlp an App similar to Google Desktop,bt clueless abt how to strt!

[eggman89]

Hi

I'm doing my Fourth Year B.E. project under the internship of MindTree!
Now they have only told us what to do , but haven't guide much!

Now, we have been told to develop an search application similar to Google Desktop one, only lighter version of it!

This is how it should work:
For all the Office 07 formats (docx,pptx....) which are XML based,rather than Binary based, the user should enter any search term(s) and our Prog should return all the files containing them! To make the matter a bit easier, this should search in a given folder rather than the whole computer!Also it should support for format extension , that is later if we want our application to support .pdf, there should be provision for that!
So ,as our guide told us, It'll need XML Parsing,Databas e maybe,Indexing maybe....

This is what we have been told to do! However nothing else told! So now our team is kinda clueless about how to start!! We have about 3 months to finish the project!

Any help will be appreciated! We have planned to develop this in JAVA,although it isn't compulsory !Anyone have any idea how Google Desktop works!

[Frinavale]

Your question is way to big.
Check out this thread on how to develop software

The experts on this site are more than happy to help you with your problems but they cannot do your assignment/program for you. Attempt the assignment/program yourself first and post questions regarding any difficulties you have or about a particular function of the code that you don't know how to achieve

Please take the time to research the problem before you post your question. We are more than willing to help you with a specific problem but you have to do your part to learn the basics and also formulate a specific question we can help with.

[chaarmann]

just divide this complex problem into parts
1.) how to read in a file as a String
2.) how to parse the string for the search term
3.) how to show the matching results.

This can all be done with a Java application No database or webapplication needed. Java supports reading local file/directory and xml-parsing. The output can be just on the command line for the easiest way;later you could use a graphical GUI, like Swing.

Now break problem into smaller parts:
1.)
- get list of all files (use class File)
- sort out the files that don't match the extension. (use regular expression)
- for each file: read file-content into a String.

This step can be done in roughly 20 lines of code, 10 minutes (professional) or 1day (beginner).
Tip: try your own to learn, but if you are stuck, browse this forum, you can already see complete code (by myself) that does exactly that.

2.)
-ask user to enter search word (on command line).
- use a SAX (or DOM) parser to parse the String from step 1 to get an internal DOM-structure from the XML-document inside the String.
- recursively traverse all nodes of DOM structure to find the search word. For each occurrence found, put out a message (on command line)

This step can be done in roughly 50 lines of code, 30 minutes (professional) or 2 days(beginner)

3.)You are already finished, but to make your application more beautiful, instead of just reading search word from command line, you could use Swing to open a window and make a form with input fields where you can define the search word and search directory and file extensions.
The output could go into a text box with a seach progress bar.

This step can be done in roughly 300 lines of code, 3 hours (professional) or 5 days(beginner)

P.S: If you do not only want to read in XML-based Word document, but any format of MS-Office documents, there are also Java-APIs that does that for you. (Apache POI)

[eggman89]

hey chaarmann!! This is exactly the kind of help we needed! Thanks!!!
:)We are totally noob and lost!