Search for Items with Specifice ZOOMCATEGORY

[zoomin]

I have some content that dynamically adds ZOOMCATEGORY meta data to a page based on certain variables (eg, sort of like tags for a blog post). I'd like for users to be able to initiate a search via a link for a specific ZOOMCATEGORY (eg, "Test Zoom Category"). I know I could put that string into the zoom_query parameter, but that will still end up including pages that lack the specified ZOOMCATEGORY.

Is there a Query String parameter that lets me search for a particular ZOOMCATEGORY, without knowing the zoom_cat #, and/or if a given ZOOMCATEGORY has not been defined in the Zoom Settings as a category that can be Filtered on (but there still are pages with this ZOOMCATEGORY meta data)? Or should I just be using Custom Meta Fields ( https://www.zoomsearchengine.com/zoo...ta_fields.html ) for this?

I'm on V7.

Thanks in advance for any help!

[Ray]

ZOOMCATEGORY tags are used to assign a page to a category in the Zoom configuration. So no, that doesn't sound like what you want.

And yes, it sounds like you should consider using the Custom Meta Fields option. Note that you do have to set this up in the Zoom configuration for the possible values or field names to look for and how it is to be considered. If it is a string, then yes, you can search for it to match any particular value, rather than a predefined set of values.

Hopefully that answers your question.

[zoomin]

Great, thanks much, I'll give that a go!

[zoomin]

Hi Ray, I have some follow up questions on this. I have what basically are "tags" which are generated by other software. I want to use the Custom Meta Fields option to have Zoom pickup each of these Tags (there will always be multiple Tags per-page in this section of the site). And then I'd like to be able to perform searches where the scope is limited/filtered by a given Tag.

Because I want to pull the list of Tags into Zoom organically (ie, not have to define a list within the Zoom config) I originally tried a Custom Meta of the Text type, but it appears that will only capture 1 value per-page, and thus won't work for my purposes. I then looked at Multi-select. I can manually add the list of values to the "Dropdown values" field in the Zoom config, but there appears to be no way to construct a search link (ie, to search based on a particular Tag) using the name -- Multi-select seems to only search based on number (eg, customMeta[]=5). The master list of Tags might change periodically, which it appears means that the numerical order would change. That's way too cumbersome to be workable for me. Is there any other way to achieve what I'm wanting with Zoom?

On another (somewhat related) note: If I'm constructing a URL (ie, a link for the user to click on) with zoom_query pre-filled, are there particular PHP functions you recommend for encoding the zoom_query value such that Zoom will correctly understand the data? For example, if the original search terms are things like "apples new/old this&that something-else"?

Thanks!

[Ray]

Your understanding of the mechanism is accurate. Unfortunately, I can't think of any easy workaround to this. Probably need another script to manage the mappings between the numeric values and your manually edited list of values.

As for encoding the query for use as a HTTP GET parameter, the PHP urlencode() function should suffice.

[zoomin]

That's a bummer, but I appreciate the confirmation, as it saves me doing further experimenting. And thanks too for the confirmation on the recommended PHP function.