Question

I have a folder with lot of files like doc, excel, ppt etc. Once the user selects a category from the combo I have assigned keywords related to the particular selection. My wpf application has to search the entire folder and content of the files for the key words and display the matching files in a gridview. Speed and performance also has to be maintained

How should I code this functionality?

Answer 1

The WPF part of your query is fairly straight-forward; just set the ItemsSource of your target control to a search result…

List<string> MyKeyWords = GetKeywords();

var allDirectories = new DirectoryInfo(SearchDirectoryName).GetDirectories("*",              SearchOption.AllDirectories);

myGrid.ItemsSource = (from di in allDirectories from fi in di.GetFiles() where HasKeyWordMatch(fi, MyKeyWords) select fi);

And then have the grid bind to the appropriate properties in a data template.

More difficult to address is the 'HasKeyWordMatch' predicate, which presumably takes a FileInfo object and a list of key words and returns a true/false if a match was found. As you want to scan proprietary formats, you’ll need to write a scanning engine for each format.