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Amberfish allows searching on specific fields within documents.
Support for various file formats is provided by document type
modules. The document type must be specified to af at
the time of indexing, using the -t option. Each document is
individually associated with a document type as it gets added to the
database. The default document type (if none is specified) is
text
, which does not recognize any fields and therefore does
not support field searching.
Here is an example of searching on a field:
$ af -s -d mydb -q 'Title/cat'
This means, “Find all documents that contain the word, `cat', in the `Title' field.”
Unlike search words, field names may be case-sensitive, so that `Title' and `title' might be two different fields. Whether or not fields are case-sensitive is determined by the document type. For example, XML elements and attributes are case-sensitive; therefore an XML document type would most likely have case-sensitive fields. As we shall discuss later, it is best not to mix document types within a single database if those document types have incompatible views about case-sensitivity.