Dow Publication Search

Dow wanted to put on their website a search tool for their scientific publications database. Unfortunately, due to technical and security concerns, Dow’s website did not have a database behind it, instead they exported the contents of their Access database into an XML file. This application, written using C#.Net, reads the XML file into an XML Dataset and the search parameters are formatted into an SQL-like string that is used to search the XML data. The design of the site was done by an outside agency as part of Dow Chemical’s global look and feel, the layout and programming were done by me.

This application has three pages, the first is a simple search interface. The first two fields, authors and publication year, are built by extracting and sorting data from the XML file. The third field, keywords, is a string that searches through various data fields in the XML looking for matches.

Once a search is submitted the user is taken to the results page. The results page shows the terms used for the search and displays a paginated list of matching publications including a brief summary of the publication. Clicking on the publication title in the result list takes the user to the publication detail page.

The final screen is the publication detail page which presents the user with bibliographic information about the selected publication.