Search Engine

This topic explains how to adjust the settings for an XperienCentral channel. In XperienCentral, navigate to Configuration > Channel Configuration. See the Setup Tool for information on configuring all other global XperienCentral settings. If your XperienCentral project contains multiple channels, you can select the channel to configure from the "Select Channel" drop-down list at the top of the Channel Configuration panel. Most changes you make to the channel configuration will become available after a browser refresh. Some configuration changes require a restart of XperienCentral (the web server).

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Starting the Search Service

Adding basic search functionality to a website is straight forward. The following are the prerequisites:

• a search service that indexes the website
• a form for entering the search query
• a page on which to display the search results

If your installation already contains a working search service you can skip this section.

The search engine is not a default part of the XperienCentral application; it runs in a separate (Java) process, therefore it has to be started by running either a batch file (Windows) or a shell script (Unix). Because the search engine process is executed in a separate process, it needs to have a basic form of authentication. This is configured in the credentials.xml file. Open credentials.xml in a text editor. It is stored in the search engine conf directory:

• For normal GX WebManager installations on Windows computers this is <xperiencentral-root>\webmanager-searchengine\target\classes\conf.
• For UNIX servers this is normally something like /vol/www/search/indexer-mywebsite/conf.

Add a valid username and password in the second line of the file:

<credentials>
   <credential pattern=".*localhost.*" type="postform" username="gxsearch" password="Search987">
</credentials>

The First Site Index

There are two main ways to index the website: manually and automatically. The second is configured by running the search engine at a scheduled time from a cron job or scheduled service. How to configure this is covered in the installation manuals for Windows and Linux product environments. This chapter will describe how to index a website manually, and also on local computers where the indexing is not scheduled.

1. Navigate to the Setup Tool. Login in as Administrator and then click the Search Tools tab.
   
   
   
   If the search engine is running correctly then the lower part of the page under ‘Server Status’ contains the number of indexed pages plus some other information. Normally when the search engine has been started for the first time than the number of pages will be 0, as starting the search engine does not automatically mean that the indexing is started:
   
   
   
   
   
   

   Right above the "Search status" information is the "Index URL" pane. This pane contains three fields that tell the search engine

   • where to start crawling the website (the "URL" field).
   • which domains are allowed (the "host" field). This should contain at least the front-end hostname, the backend hostname. Optionally this can contain front-end and backend alias hostnames. The hostnames must be separated by a comma.
   • how deep the crawler goes. Normally this is set to 1, which means the crawler will index the page in the ‘URL’ field plus all the pages that are linked from the "URL" page.
   
   
   
   
   

   By default the "URL" field contains the URL of the so called indexer page. This indexer page contains links to all accessible XperienCentral pages, documents and articles. The URL is normally something like http://<domain>:<port>/web/webmanager?id=39016. To see all the URLs that will be indexed open this URL in a separate window.
   
   

2. Click on the [Index] button to start the indexing process. The search engine crawler will open the indexer page and start indexing all the pages and documents. This process will take anywhere from several seconds for a small website to several hours for a large website. For a detailed description of the indexing process see *** Crawling.

   
   
   
   
   

   In the upper part of the ‘Search Tools’ page the search engine can be tested by entering one or more search terms and hitting ‘<Enter>’ or clicking on the [Relevance] or [Date] buttons:
   
   
   
   

   In a normal situation this should return results. If there are zero documents in the index, or if there are documents in the index that are not returned in the search field, or if there is a certain document that’s missing, see ***troubleshooting.

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Search Element and Search Results

The Search Element

The basic search element is added to the page by adding the Search element to a page from the Insert menu:

1. Select the size of the "Search" box in pixels.
2. Select whether to restrict the search to pages that are on the same level as the page on which the Search element has been added.
3. Select whether to restrict the search to only the subpages of the page on which the Search element has been added.

4. Select where to display the search results. If you select "Yes", the results will be shown on the page containing the Search element. If you select "No" and then click [Apply], you can then select the page on which to display the results.
   
   

   On most websites the Search element is not placed on one or more pages but rather on a central page section. This is a better solution because you only have to do it once and can centrally manage the Search element.

Search Results Page

The default search results are displayed with the following basic set of information:

• A number and the title of the page or article
• The bread crumb path or navigation path (for pages only)
• A summary of the contents

Some presentation properties can be changed by creating a design template variant of the "WM Advanced search element".

1. Navigate to Configuration > Design Templates.
2. Set the scope to "SearchElement" and choose WM Advanced search element".
3. Click on the button [New presentation variant]:
   
   
   
   
   
4. Modify the new design template as desired.
5. Navigate to the page containing the Search element and select the new design template variant for the Search element  in order to preview the look and feel of the Search element.
   
   

Central Search Results Page

You can show search results on a special page. This is convenient because you can use a special presentation or add special content to accompany the results. To assign a special search results page, follow these steps:

1. Navigate to Configuration > Channel Configuration.
2. Click [Special Pages].
3. Click [Search] next to "Search-result page" and select the search results page from Advanced Search.

4. Click [Select] and then [Apply]. The search results page is assigned. For example:
   
   
   
   
   

   Be sure that the search results page that you select is not visible in the website navigation.

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Additional Indexing Options

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