Search

One of the major advantages of the MVD format is the ability to search all versions simultaneously. The search implementation in the underlying platform (as in MVDDeskViewer) has been around for some time, but making it available in the wiki, where the search results have to be sent to the browser as HTML, and the text highlighted and merged with other highlighted text, was not easy. However, it all seems to work fine now.

The user can search only the currently selected version (that's the ">" button in the image below) or all versions (the ">>" button). When searching all versions the display loads new versions as needed; it also updates the other window to reflect the different insertions or deletions with respect to the new version. You may search in either the left-hand or right-hand window in TwinView. Repeated clicks on a search button find successive matches starting from the current version; it also wraps around at the end, eventually taking you back to your original version.

Bug Fixes

This iteration also removes some outstanding bugs which appear only on Windows in Internet Explorer particularly. In EditVersions previously if you chose to edit, add or delete a version or group in a Windows browser it usually failed. Thankfully, it doesn't do so any more. I have tested it on Firefox and IE6 on Windows XP, and also on Safari and Firefox on Mac OSX.

Wish-list

There remain, however, some deficiencies:

• Because each set of search results are sent to the browser, the entire text of each version, or pair of versions, has to be sent each time, making the response seem a bit slow, when in fact the search itself is really fast. I need to use AJAX here to only send the differences and update the HTML. However, this is not a real problem at the moment because the client and server are on the same machine.
• Because I am developing on a very wide screen I tend to forget how little screen space there is on the average laptop. The buttons on the left of the display are a serious problem in TwinView, and will have to be moved above the text-columns as a matter of some urgency.
• Also urgent is providing some means of synchronisation between columns in TwinView. I tried but failed in this iteration to make it align the text on one side whenever you click on the text on the other. Getting this to work cross-browser in JavaScript, however, has so far eluded me.

Here is another screen dump showing how it displays search hits using a background colour and <span> elements in HTML. This is a bit of kludge, but using real selections, as you do with a mouse, doesn't work on all browsers. (Text © N. Brocca 2008)