Tutorial: Searching Musi-Cal

(Note: Anywhere you see something like send a "foo" command to the Musi-Cal command processor it means to send an email message to concerts@musi-cal.com with a message body of "foo".)

Searching Musi-Cal is easy. Two interfaces are supported, one using the World-Wide Web (WWW) and one using email. This document focuses on the email interface, although the WWW interface is described briefly.

Using the WWW interface

If you have access to the WWW interface you can select any of the search links in http://www.musi-cal.com/ There are three simplified interfaces, one used to browse by state and city, one used to browse by performer name and a third, available on the front page of Musi-Cal that is used to search based on a single field. There is also a general search interface that allows you to search by a varied combination of performer name, geography, keywords and dates. You can also use the general search form to establish repetitive queries.

Using the email interface

Using the email interface is analogous to using the general search form in the WWW interface. (There is currently no email interface to the simpler WWW search forms.) All commands to the email interface must be sent to concerts@musi-cal.com. Only the body of the message is read. The Subject: field of the message is ignored except to generate a corresponding Subject: for the reply.

Simple use of the get command

The get command describes the constraints you want to place on the search. For instance, a simple search for upcoming folk music events in New York City is

    get
	type folk
	city New York
	state NY
    end

Each field must appear on a separate line. Lines can be continued by ending them with a backslash (\). For instance,

    get
	keywords acoustic,folk,rock
    end

is equivalent to

    get
	keywords acoustic,folk,rock
    end

Lines can be broken anywhere. All the backslash character does is cause the next line to be appended to the current line. This is especially important for users whose mail systems insist on truncating lines to keep them less than 80 characters. In most cases, the backslash is not required, as long as it is okay to have a space where the line break occurs and the first word of the continuation line is not a special keyword like performer. So, we could also have used

    get
	keywords acoustic,
		  folk,
		  rock
    end

Proximity Searching

If you live in a large metropolitan area, finding interesting concerts searching city-by-city will be tedious. Musi-Cal supports a radius field to enable searching within an entire region:

    get
	type folk
	city New York
	state NY
	radius 50 miles
    end

How the command processor works

When searching the event database the command processor matches each field in turn, requiring at least one element of each field to match. The type and keyword fields can contain multiple items separated by commas. For instance specifying a type field of

    type rock,classical

will match events having rock or classical as one of their types.

The performer, venue and event fields match strings called regular expressions. Proper treatment of regular expressions is beyond the scope of this document. A short description of the use of regular expressions to improve searching is available by sending a "help regex" command to the Musi-Cal command processor.