MSDE and Full Text Search Catalog

Hi there,
First off: I know that MSDE can't handle Full Text Catalogs.

Now I'd like to know if someone knows about a product or method which I could use that would give me the same result and work with MSDE.

The reason I ask is the following:
We have developed an Intranet application based upon MS Sharepoint Portal Server 2003 for Document Management purposes. Every Document has about 20 customized Properties which can be set. We do have an extensive interface for searching these documents
Now every user can have his "Favorite Documents" in a personal location.
What we are doing now is a "Local" version of this application. It will not allow documents to be modifed and will export the Users Favorites to his personal Computer.
For the moment we store everything (including the documents themselves) in a local MSDE Database.
Now we were recently asked to allow the user to search these local documents. Or at least search for documents with specific properties(i.e. no content indexing needed)

However I don't know how to go about this.

The structure I have for the DB is following

tblFiles
FileGUID FileName
1 Doc1
2 Doc2

tblProperties
PropertyGUID PropertyName
1 Name
2 Author

tblFileProperties
FileGUID PropertyGUID Value
1 1 Test Document.doc
1 2 John Smith
2 1 Dcoument for testing.xls
2 2 John Doe

Now you get the idea

We want to user to be able to specify search criteria for multiple properties
e.g. return every Document where Author Like 'John' and Name Like 'Document'
Preferably we should also be able to use wildcars. But that is not abolutely necessary for the moment.

Now I guess to achieve this I'd need a full text Search Catalog on tblFileProperties.Value, but I'm not even sure about that.

Any help please

RizziManIf your documents are in TEXT you can still search for them using SELECT and XML in SQL Server, the search will just be longer because SQL Server creates an Arithmetic pointer to the file. Full Text is Microsoft Proprietry technology that includes the search with CONTAINS and other key words. Full Text requires Microsoft Catalog to be populated before searches because it is not fully integrated into SQL Server, if the catalog is not populated your search will be empty. If your named concurrent users are less than 75 you can implement the Premium Small business Server 2003 and use the SQL Server that comes with it. Hope this helps.

Kind regards,
Gift Peddie|||I'm gonna have a look at what you suggested using SELECT and XML. (btw, the document content don't even need to be indexed. Only the Properties. But that should work the same way I guess)

The point is: this will be a local application with only 1 concurrent user. We do have SQL Server with Full Text Calatlog Licenses on a few servers running. But this is supposed to work on peoples Laptop when they are not connected to our company network. So I can only work with free software here as the management won't agree on buying any licenses.

Anyway, thank you for the help

Anyone else?