Using delimited text files

[Jester]

Hello,

Let me start by saying that I'm very new to using AMS so please be gentle with me.

I'm trying to develop an PDF veiwing app which would run off a CD/DVD. A user would enter search criteria (perhaps up to 4 items) then the app would parse through a delimited text index file and display a list of all the pdf files on the dvd that meet the users search criteria. The user would select which file they want and Acrobat reader (included on the disk) would open it.

Playing around with this I've managed to get it to work using only one search value and I think with some more tinkering I can get it to work for multiple values. The issue is the time needed to search through the index file.

Using a 3 field, 17 character, "|" delimited file, 26000 lines long, the search takes several minutes just for one item. This is running on a 2.6ghz WinXP Pro box with 512mb RAM. Is this a reasonable search time for this? Can anyone suggest a better/faster way of doing this search?

[ovm]

I think the PDF's are loaded from CD?
Is it an option to copy the files to HD first?
The searching will be much faster.

gr. mario

[Jester]

In my testing all the files resided on the hard drive. What I'm searching isn't the pdf files themselves, but a delimited text file containing an index of a group of pdf filenames.

Any ideas I can get on this would be wonderful.

Also, I'm using ver.4 which was on my work system when I started working here. Is there anyone who knows of a version 5 demo app of some sorts that would demonstrate (to my boss) just how powerful this tool is? I'd like to have version 5 but I'll need to show the money man that it's truely useful.

[Ted Sullivan]

If speed is a concern, AutoPlay Media Studio 5.0 is *much* faster than v4.0. The new scripting engine is incredibly quick and optimized for data handling tasks and execution speed.

With v5.0, you could easily load a text file into a variable and have search operations performed on it entirely in memory. The data handling is also much more flexible, with support for tables (arrays) and a variety of string operations.

It sounds like it would be worthwhile to check out v5.0, if only for the speed increase.

[Worm]

Not to mention you could use the database plugin and get away from csv files altogether

[willfreer]

Hi guys,

I saw this string on PDFs and I was wondering did it ever work for anybody?

I would like to do something simular, (Where as I might type a phrase and ask it to pull up all the PDFs on the CD with this phrase).

thanks