Retriever

I am pleased to announce a new commercial application for RISC OS called Retriever which I wrote during the last months.

Retriever is a program that helps you to find documents containing desired terms or fulfilling other criteria quickly.

To be able to do so Retriever must first analyse the documents it is to search which may take a while. The kind of a document is determined by its type (this means RISC OS file type). For each type of document a certain so called parser is required which parses the document, extracts parts out of it
and passes these parts which are called elements to one or more so called archivers which note the occurrence of such an element for a document inside
an internal database. Elements are of a certain type. Every parser can handle one or more RISC OS file types and every archiver can cope with one or more element types. Parsers are allowed to extract documents out of documents. These subdocuments are also analysed by Retriever in case that an according
parser is available. The content of the subdocuments is logically assigned to the document out of which it was extracted.

After documents have been analysed you are able to search for the documents by entering search criteria. All entered criteria must be fulfilled by a document so that it is shown inside the result list. There is a separate input mask for every element type to enter the desired criteria. The desired criteria are passed internally to the archivers which are trying to find the related documents. The result list is a HTML-document which shows a list of the documents fulfilling all of the requested criteria.

Retriever costs 47.60 EUR incl. MWst. (19%) in the Federal Republic of Germany and 48 EUR incl. VAT (20%) in Great Britain.

You can obtain detailed information about Retriever from the homepage of my company

http://www.stader-softwareentwicklung-gmbh.com.de/indexE.htm

or the German version

http://www.stader-softwareentwicklung-gmbh.com.de/index.htm

section RISC OS Software

There you can also download the manual.

In case you have any questions about the program please contact me by email:

Verwaltung@stader-softwareentwicklung-gmbh.com.de

Retriever sounds very interesting, particularly the possibilities of searching files that are not plain ASCII text. I cooked up an application for my own use called YAL (Yet Another Locater) but it is restricted to searching plain text; C source code, for example. Where YAL differs from most other retrieval software that I know of, is that 1) it searches for patterns in lines of text, 2) the search criteria can be negative (ignore lines that match the following patterns), 3) you can specify many positive and/or negative criteria at a time for the search. It uses either literal text or Lua pattern-matching (so ^ denotes beginning of line, $ end of line, %a any alphabetic character, %A any non-alphabetic character, … etc). It is fast, and the output (time-stamped) is displayed in a taskwindow, so can be saved.

Where YAL differs from most other retrieval software that I know of, is that […] 2) the search criteria can be negative (ignore lines that match the following patterns)

I’m fairly sure that one’s not unique, as even Locate can do it.