This sections describes the optional configurations that you can make to BDDBot.

Creating a Search Page

The built in web server that is part of the BDDBot is a very stripped down web server and as such it only outputs the results to a search query. You will need to create a search page yourself to start the initial search since the search engine does not output a default search page (although you could add some code to the QueryConnection class so that it does have an initial search page).

Don't worry though, building a search page is very easy. Simply create a page that looks like what you want the search page to look like and add the following HTML to the body of the page:

<form action="http://your.server.name:8001/query" method=GET>
<input type="text" name="words" value="" size=45>
<input type="submit" value="Search">
</form>
You should change "your.server.name" to the name of the machine that you're running the BDDBot on and you should change 8001 to the port number you are using if you have changed the port number.



Configuring the BDDBot's Search Output

You can easily configure the look and feel of the search output using three HTML files, which are all in the "searchdb" directory. The first two files are called "header.html" and "footer.html". As their names imply, the web server respectively outputs them immediately before and immediately after the results.

The other file that you may want to customize is the file called "notfound.html". Whenever a search query returns no results at all, the file "notfound.html" is what is output. You can design this just like any other HTML file since it will be output in its entirety and by itself.

You may be wondering how to put images on the results pages since the custom built web server can only output the three files listed above. You can have images on your page simply by putting them on another web server and then referring to them with their absolute URL inside of the results pages. The same method can be applied to sounds, Java applets, and other objects.



Configuring Other Aspects of the BDDBot

If you want to configure more than just the search output you will need to alter the code for the BDDBot yourself (hey, that's what it's there for). Most things that you might want to configure which are actually easily configurable can be found in the "EnginePrefs.java" class in the "bdd/search" directory. You should have already configured one aspect of this file by setting the administrative email address to your own email address.

Another important parameter in this file that you might want to configure is the TCP port for the custom web server. The default port for the web server is 8001, but if you are already running something on this port you will want to select an unused port.

After making your desired changes you should recompile the EnginePrefs class with the following command in UNIX/Linux


	javac bdd/search/EnginePrefs.java

and the following command in Windows

	javac bdd\search\EnginePrefs.java