converting MSIDXS search to Windows Search Service for website

Question

Here's my situation: I'm in the process of a website overhaul to the public website for our company. The old site was running on server 2003 on .net framework 3.5? it may have been originally built on the 2.0 framework for that matter. ANYway, the old site had a search feature which worked really nicely for users to find pages related to topics they were interested in. It used the old MSIDXS oledb connection type... simple code as follows...

Dim odbSearch As New System.Data.OleDb.OleDbConnection("Provider=""MSIDXS"";Data Source=""Proto"";")
Dim cmdSearch As New System.Data.OleDb.OleDbCommand
cmdSearch.CommandText = String.Format("SELECT doctitle, filename, vpath, rank, characterization, size FROM scope() WHERE FREETEXT(Contents, '{0}') ORDER BY rank DESC", searchText)  WHERE CONTAINS(*,'\""" & searchText & "*\""') AND scope='file:C:\...\Web_App' ORDER BY System.ItemPathDisplay DESC

This worked great. But now we're moving this to a 2008 r2 server, which doesn't have the MSIDXS indexing anymore... or it does, but doesn't work for sites? I was able to turn it on, but it never found anything, and the catalog remained empty, and everything I've read said this isn't how to do searches on sites anymore. The 'new way' that I read about was using windows search service. I've adjusted the service on the box to 'index' the website's directory, and it seems to have stuff in the catalog... however, what code I've converted always returns 0. so the new code looks like...

Dim odbSearch As New System.Data.OleDb.OleDbConnection("Provider=Search.CollatorDSO.1;Extended Properties='Application=Windows';")
cmdSearch.CommandText = String.Format("SELECT system.title, system.filename, System.ItemPathDisplay FROM SystemIndex WHERE scope='file:C:\...\Web_App'")
Dim rdrSearch As OleDbDataReader = cmdSearch.ExecuteReader()
While rdsSearch.read()

I can't get this to actually return any results. regardless of what I put in as the search criteria, it jumps right to the end while.

Can someone tell me what piece of the puzzle I'm missing?

Answer 1

Everything was actually correct; I wasn't getting any rows back because I had already narrowed the systemIndex to be looking at the subdirectory that I wanted, so including a scope in the where clause was causing zero results. As soon as I took that out, the search works.

Answer 2

It looks that the scope should be specified as 'file:C:\\...\\Web_App', or add a '@' sign at the beginning of your query string.