How to provide source specific look and feel in search result?

I have an application that serves as a repository/cache of data from multiple sources. It contains emails from ms exchange, word , excel documents, web pages, files etc. You know, it is something similar to the crawled data/index repository of a search engine (like google Desktop).

I am开发者_StackOverflow中文版 planning to provide a search interface to that repository. However I am suck on an issue.

My requirement is, when user click on a search result , the application should show the result from cache and it should appear just like how it will look like in the original source.

For example if user click on a search result which is an email, it should be displayed like how it will look like in outlook.

Any thoughts?

---

In the one search project that I worked on, we captured the full path to the data source, ie /path/2/file.(pdf, xls, html, etc) as field that is stored in the search index. When a result is presented, the link to the source is also included in the result. Then (for the easy ones), the link would start the required application based on filename extension.

Our project was more complex, in that we had archived emails that had to be indexed from an archive, with the path in the archive indexed in AND another field for LDAP permissions associated with the email. The search would only show results on email archive where you had the permissions to view the email. Then, if a user clicked on the email, we would have to start a seperated process to retrieve the actual document from the email archive, and make it available to the users email client (lotus notes, (same for exchange)). That was a fair amount of coding and discovery of tech issues with the archive, etc.

It will help your research if you add tags on your posting here on StackOverflow for the search engine you are using. You also may need to find alternate sources of info on your search engine, as often times the best answers are from a user or developers project email list. (I'm thinking of the high quality material you'll see on the lucene dev website for example

I hope this helps.

P.S. as you appear to be a new user, if you get an answer that helps you please remember to mark it as accepted, or give it a + (or -) as a useful answer