QHelpSearchEngine Class Reference
[QtHelp module]

Detailed Description

The QHelpSearchEngine class provides access to widgets reusable to integrate fulltext search as well as to index and search documentation.

Before the search engine can be used, one has to instantiate at least a QHelpEngineCore object that needs to be passed to the search engines constructor. This is required as the search engine needs to be connected to the help engines setupFinished() signal to know when it can start to index documentation.

After starting the indexing process the signal indexingStarted() is emitted and on the end of the indexing process the indexingFinished() is emited. To stop the indexing one can call cancelIndexing().

While the indexing process has finished, the search engine can now be used to search thru its index for a given term. To do this one may use the possibility of creating the QHelpSearchQuery list by self or reuse the QHelpSearchQueryWidget which has the inbuild functionality to set up a proper search querys list that get's passed to the search engines search() function.

After the list of querys has been passed to the search engine, the signal searchingStarted() is emited and after the search has finished the searchingFinished() signal is emited. The search process can be stopped by calling cancelSearching().

If the search succeeds, the searchingFinished() will be called with the search hits count, which can be reused to fetch the search hits from the search engine. Calling the hits() function with the range of hits you would like to get will return a list of the requested SearchHits. They basically constist at the moment of a pair of strings where the values of that pair are the documentation file path and the page title.

To display the given hits use the QHelpSearchResultWidget or build up your own one if you need more advanced functionality. Note that the QHelpSearchResultWidget can not be instantiated directly, you must retrieve the widget from the search engine in use as all connections will be established for you by the widget itself.

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