The purpose of powrsrch.mv is to allow a customer to search one or more fields which are made selectable by the store owner. The store owner can choose any fields within the products.dbf structure to be available. If you have an altered products.dbf structure, it will even allow selection of those additional fields (see screen shot below).

You can also exclude a word or phrase. An example of an exclude word usage might be: You sell health food but want the ability for customers to NOT list ingredients they are allergic to. So in the product name field you might have Soup. Then if you have a field in your database called Ingredient the customer could check the name and ingredient fields for searching. In the keyword input they would put soup. In the exclude input they could put MSG. It would search both fields. If it found soup in either it would compile those products to the list. But if the word MSG appeared in either field, it would remove it from the list.

Specific category, if selected, allows one category only searches. This feature may be too intimidating if you have hundreds of categories as the pull down select would be quite long.

For store owners who have found their searches take too long, you can reduce the search time by only searching one or two fields. The Merchant default is eight fields, including fields such as weight. Now, how useful is that? Finally.... the store owner has control without editing the db.mv code library.

The total number of products found is displayed along with the list of products matching the search criteria.

In admin, you can view the log of search words/phrases which your customers have used. This helps you from a marketing standpoint to determine the most sought after products. Additionally, it helps you identify keywords which might be useful to include in the narrative descriptions or the meta tag for search engine submissions.

This module works with both the mmui and oui User Interfaces (versions 2.22-4.x). If using the mmui, six edits in the mmui.mv file are required, and one optional edit if you want to remove the archaic standard Merchant, keyword search. If using the oui, Power Search plugs into the oui without editing oui modules. The trade off is that the oui is slower.

See the screen shot below, then check out the selected field search in our store. We have about 600 products in our store so you can get an idea of search speed on a moderate speed server.

The Power Search function can also be used for pre-defined form pulldowns in your store. As an example, the genre and decade searches on the left side of this screen search a specific field, with store owner pre-defined selections. This same technique can be used for things like manufacturer searches if you have a manufacturer field in your products.dbf.