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I am trying to integrate the Windows desktop file search feature into MSAccess to search files based on content .
For eg:
I want to search for all the files containing “Noble” in its content( preferably it also searches PDF content ) in a specific fodler(s) form MS Access.
Can anyone suggest good place to start?
I’ve been down this road. Windows Search or Google Search are quite problematic, particularly if you want to search data on a server, because you have to maintain indexes on each client workstation. There’s a server version for Windows Search but the API is very complicated.
Office versions from 97 to 2003 provided a FileSearch object that was quite versatile, but that was removed in Office 2007.
Because of that, I coded up a FileSearch class module for use in Access to replace the core functionality provided by the old FileSearch object. You can find the code on my website. It still needs a lot of work, but I’ve had in production use since June 2009. It does have some issues on Vista/Win7 if you try to search folders that aren’t available to non-admin users, and some other problems, too. I’ve wanted to get back to it and change the progress bar to use WithEvents, but as I’ve already got a working implementation for the two applications where I’m using it, it wasn’t really worth my time.
Try it and see if you have any problems. For searching files for strings in those files, it works pretty well (much faster than the built-in WinXP search functionality!), but it’s not going to be as fast as Vista/Win7’s search, since it’s not index-based.