Looking for a way to search for keywords in external documents

[jwalz]

I am hoping that someone can suggest something to help me. I have a database where the paths to documents are stored. I need a way from within Access to execute or launch an app that would go out and search documents in these directories for user specified keywords.

Does anyone know of anything that will do this?

Thanks for your help.
Janet

 

[TheQuestioner]

I had a similar problem a year ago with for a recruitment company that wanted to do something like this from a VB app. I resolved it by opening the text document (or Word documents in this case) as a text file from within VB using the following synatax:-

Dim strFileContents As String, lngFileSize As Long

lngFileSize = FileLen(strFullFilePath)

' Make the string the size of the file
strFileContents = Space(lngFileSize)

Open strFullFilePath For Binary Access Read As #1

' Read the entire file into the string
Get #1, 1, strFileContents
Close #1

I then went on to search the strFileContents var for whatever keywords I need by using INSTR and/or cycling through each char and checking it's context with it's neighbouring chars. This method worked especially well for Word documents as it treated them as (encoded) text files - allowing them to be processed much faster.

 

[Steve101]

This is probably an overkill for your requirement, but an excellent 3rd party product is Isys. If you have lots of documents that need searching, it will index the content(automatically), and allow you to search in a manner similar to web search engines. It can be integrated with applications, web etc. All depends on the requirement, and of course the budget.
Cheers,
Steve