Setting Search Options

This chapter explains how to sort through and modify an extensive set of options for configuring how conceptual search operates in your exteNd Director applications.

The following topics are covered:

About search options

exteNd Director provides a varied and powerful set of capabilities for implementing sophisticated Autonomy-based conceptual searching in your applications. Within this environment, you can shape search technology and behavior by modifying a number of configurable search options at design time and runtime. You can tailor:

Types of data to search—content and/or metadata
When and how often to import and index content from your data source as updates occur
Types of document formats to search
Operations that trigger the synchronization of the search database with your data source

For more information

Detailed information about search options is available from these sources:

For	See
Detailed descriptions of the complete set of options	Search Options Reference
Guidance on how to decide which options to modify	A decision matrix next
Instructions on how to configure search options	How to modify search options

A decision matrix

Before you configure search options, consider these key decision points about search capabilities required by your application:

Decision	Action
How do I want to configure the exteNd Director Dynamic Reasoning Engine (DRE)?	Use the DRE Administration console to set up a connection with a DRE running on a particular host using a specific port. See Administering the Dynamic Reasoning Engine.
What types of documents do I want to search?	Specify which supported document MIME types and associated file extensions you want to index for searching by setting the options Importable MIME types and Importable file extensions.
Do I want to search binary document formats or just text format?	Enable binary document search by setting the options Support binary document formats? and Install directory for binary document text filters.
How do I synchronize the Content Management (CM) repository and the corresponding exteNd Director DRE database as updates occur in the CM repository?	Specify synchronization behavior by setting the options Synchronization mode, Operations that trigger immediate synchronization, and Number of deleted documents to batch up.
What kind of information do I want to index for conceptual searching?	Specify the content and metadata you want to index by setting the options Index document content?, Index standard document metadata?, and Index custom document metadata?. NOTE: It is recommended that you enable at least one of these options so that the indexing process produces meaningful results.
Do I want detailed error tracing of the indexing process?	Set the option Debug during import?.
Do I want to search for numbers?	Set IndexNumbers = 1 in the Autonomy DRE configuration file, as described in Searching for numbers.
Do I want to search in other languages?	Set language-specific configuration parameters and specify sentence-breaking files, as described in Searching in other languages.

How to modify search options

There are several strategies for modifying search options:

The diagram below illustrates the recommended order of operations for modifying search options:

srcConfigFlow

IMPORTANT: You must mirror any changes you make in the DRE Administration console in the exteNd Director environment—either by modifying the associated settings in the exteNd Director Project Wizard at design time when you create your exteNd Director project or by modifying the config.xml file in an existing exteNd Director project.

Configuring the DRE using the exteNd Director DRE Administration console

You can configure your exteNd Director DRE by using the DRE Administration console, a graphical user interface for administering the exteNd Director DRE. The procedure is described in Setting DRE search options.

Setting search options at design time

A subset of search options can be modified at design time when you create a custom exteNd Director project:

You can set these options on the Content Management Search Options panel in the exteNd Director Project Wizard during custom setup. This procedure is described in the chapter on configuring exteNd Director applications in Developing exteNd Director Applications.

You cannot modify these options when you create a standard exteNd Director project, because they are set to default values automatically. However, you can override these defaults after you create your project, as described in Setting search options in an existing exteNd Director project.

Setting search options in an existing exteNd Director project

You can modify settings for all search options in an existing exteNd Director project by editing the Content Management (CM) configuration file config.xml. When you modify options in this file, you must redeploy your project for the changes to take effect.

Here is an example of the XML specification option that enables Autonomy-based conceptual search capability in the default CM repository:

  <property>
  <key>com.sssw.cm.search.enable.Default</key>
  <value>true</value>
  </property>

For more information For detailed descriptions of all search options, see Search Options Reference.

Defining options for a specific Content Management repository

There is a subset of search options that must be defined for each Content Management (CM) repository that you use:

If you scroll through the Content Management configuration file, you will see that these search options have repository names appended to their keys. For example, options defined for the Default CM repository have keys that end with the text string Default.

Setting search options programmatically at runtime

You can set a number of search options programmatically at runtime by writing exteNd Director components that call methods defined for the EbiDataFetcherDelegate class in the Search API. These settings remain in effect only for the duration of the runtime session.

These are the options that can be modified at runtime:

Option	EbiDataFetcherDelegate method
Name of DRE database	setDestRepository()
Name of DRE host	setHost()
Index port	setIndexPort()
Symbol for concatenating multivalue custom metadata values before indexing	setMultiValueDelim()
Index document content?	setProcessContent()
Index custom document metadata?	setProcessExtnMeta()
Index standard document metadata?	setProcessMeta()
Query port	setQueryPort()
Copy document contents into the DRE?	setStoreContent()

For more information about these options, see Search Options Reference.

Setting search options by modifying the DRE configuration file

You can set specific search options by modifying DRE parameters directly in the DRE configuration file located in autonomy\engine\DirectorDRE.cfg in the exteNd Director installation directory.

After changing settings in this file, you must restart the DRE (as described in Resetting the DRE) and reindex the data (as described in Forcing indexing).