Hi Todd-
That could get a little involved, depending on what sort of features the
user expects for this. The basic approach would be something like this
(assuming that they are interested in simple text search, without trying
to parse XML documents):
1) Get the file list, probably using some combination of
file_selector() and glob()
2) Load each file as text, search for string; if found, add to
"hits" list
3) Report hits to user
Presumably the user would like an easy way to select from the list of
hits to open specific files and view them. That's where the "involved"
part comes in, you might end up having to do a custom XUI or something
to make that work. The customer would also probably want special
handling for XML files versus other kinds of files (at least that's what
I'd want if it were me).
Plus, it would most likely involve either customizing the OOTB Find
dialog or creating your own custom search dialog with controls to let
the user specify their file selection criteria and any other options you
want to provide.
I guess you and your customer will ultimately have to decide for
yourselves, but from my perspective, I'm not sure the value here would
be worth the cost of developing the customization. Personally, when I
want to do a "find in files" type of search I just switch to my text
editor and do it there. The text editor (jEdit in my case) has this
feature already implemented and tested, and has a slick interface for
managing the search results.
--Clay
Clay Helberg
Senior Consultant
TerraXML
