Question

We are building an internal application where users have the option to save word documents in the system,But the issue is the users should have the ability to search for these documents by keywords.
We use asp.net,c# and Sqlserver 2008.I was wondering to save these documents in a Varchar field and then searching these fields for keywords or do i need to use full text search using Solr/Lucene.

I would like to know if this is the efficient design for this purpose.

Thanks in advance !

Answer 1

If you have to store word documents in the database and you wish to be able to search them by some classic keywords then use a Virtual Path Provider, each time the document is saved put some keywords in a dB field and search using those keywords. This method will get around the DB Copy that John3136 mentioned.

If you need to be able to search on the content of the documents you wont be able to do that if the files are saved as blobs, so for this purpose it may make more sense to save the documents as XML Word 2003 and configure a Full Text search to ignore angle brackets, eg:

Regex.Replace(dBFieldOfWordXMLData, @"<[^>]*>", string.Empty);

I think the most efficient way is to use a Virtual Path Provider, MSDN Articles and Sharepoint documents use Virtual Path Provider and they are searchable. I’ve done some research on what the most efficient solution would be came across EpiServer CMS on Azure: http://episerverazurevpp.codeplex.com/