Searching a document contents stored in database

[shailendra Patil]

Hi,
I have a requirement where user will be uploading excel document from UI, I am planning to store that document in database as BLOB.

Now if user wants to perform search from UI based on contents of the documents, respective documents will be displayed as a search result.


I would appreciate any help in this matter as it's driving me crazy to implement the solution.

Regards
Shailendra

[Rob Spoor]

Welcome to the Ranch!

Storing the document as a BLOB will be good if you need to extract the document, but it will be stored in its binary form. That means you can't search on it.

You should probably use Apache POI, JExcelAPI (a.k.a. jxl) or another library to read the document, then store its readable content in another field (type CLOB probably - a form of text-based BLOB; "text" is another often used name for it) on which you will then search.

[Ulf Dittmer]

Alternatively, use a library like Lucene to build a search index whenever a document is stored in the DB. The Apache Tika library -a Lucene add-on- can index Excel files (amongst other formats).

[shailendra Patil]

Thanks Rob & Ulf for your quick reply.


let me try the solution suggested by your guys with Sample program & I'll let you know the result soon.

Hopefully by implementing CLOB datatype it will solve my purpose.

[Paul Okeke]

Also depending on size files you are storing, it is not advisable to store large files in the base for performance reasons.
Instead saving the files on the hard disk and storing the path of the saved file in the database could be another solution.