Plone: generic search form for portal_catalog - plone-4.x

Question

I have a few Plone sites with Archetypes-based contents.
I noticed that the vanilla portal_catalog search form (manage_catalogView) allows to filter by language, portal_type (one!) and path only - since these are always available.
Thus, whenever I need a quick search by any other criteria, this involves programming, e.g. writing a throw-away Script (Python).
Is there some extension which provides a generic search form, offering all configured search indexes? E.g.:
Search for IDs
Search for Creator
Search for creation time (two fields, for min and max; one of them or both could be used)
review state (use the distinct values for selectable choices)
...

Answer 1

Perhaps I missunderstood your question, but you don't need external methods for a catalog search or a custom extension.
You can use a python script object and call it right from url.
Go to ZMI root, add a Script(python) using the selection field in the upper right corner. Give an id and delete the example content.
Use the examples for queryCatalog or searchCatalog you will find in http://docs.plone.org/develop/plone/searching_and_indexing/query.html
and call your script using the TEST Tab or form URL.
Example:
In ZMI Root Folder, I created a python script called my_test
catalog = context.portal_catalog
from DateTime import DateTime
# DateTime deltas are days as floating points
end = DateTime() + 0.1
start = DateTime() - 1
date_range_query = { 'query':(start,end), 'range': 'min:max'}
query = {'id': ['id_1', 'id_2'],
'Creator': ['creator1', 'creator2'],
'created': date_range_query,
'review_state': ['published', 'pending']}
results = catalog.queryCatalog(query)
for brain in results:
print brain.pretty_title_or_id()
return printed
Finally, if you set some parameters into your python script you can also pass them through URL or the TEST tab.
Hope it helps you