I have been using Sitecore query and FAST query for some sections of the website. But with growing content these queries have gotten slow and I'd like to implement Lucene querying for content to speed up things.
I am wondering if I can just use the System index instead of having to setup a separate index. Does Sitecore by default index all content in the content editor? Is this a good approach or should I just create my own index?
(I'm going to assume your using Sitecore 6.4->6.6)
As with everything .. it depends .. Sitecore keeps an index of all the Sitecore items in its system index, you are welcome to use that. Sometimes you may want a more specialised or restricted list of items, like being based on a certain template, being indexed or need a checkbox field indexed (as the system one by default only indexes text fields).
Setting up your own search index is pretty easy.. It does require some fiddling with the web.config though (and I'd recommend adding as a .include file).
Create an new <index> node with its own id that will define the name of the collection and the folder it will go into. (You can check its working by looking for the dir in the /data/indexes directory of your installation.
.. next you can tell the crawler which database to look at (most likely master if you want unpublished content to be indexed or web for published stuff) and where to start the search from (in this example I am indexing only the news section). You can tag,boostand tell if whether to IndexAllFields (otherwise it will only index fields it understands as text .. rich-text / multi-line text / text etc).
.. Finally, you can tell the indexer which template types to include or exclude.
How the indexer works is that it will subscribed to item events within sitecore .. so every time an item is changed or moved or deleted the index will be updated automatically. Obviously if you are indexing the web db the items will need to have been published.
More in-depth info on the query syntax & indexing can be found here on SDN.
The search syntax and API is much improved in 6.4/6.5 but if you want to add extra kick then my colleague Alex Shyba's Advanced Database Crawler is worth checking out too.
Hope this helps :D
You will want to implement your own index. For the same reason that you are seeing things slow down when there is a lot of content, indexes slow down when there is a lot of content in it as well.
I prefer targeted indexes meant specifically to drive the functionality I need and only has the data in it that is required. This allows for smaller and more efficient index usage on your components.
Additionally, you probably want to look into the AdvancedDatabaseCrawler put together by Alex Shyba. There are a few blogs out there with some great posts on implementing this lucene indexing module.
A separate index is always a wise decision, you can keep it light. In big environments the system index can grow up to gigabytes.
You can exclude the content from the index, as you will only be using it for performing lookups, not showing content from the index.
Finally: the system index is for the master database, you'll be querying the web database, possibly on a content delivery server.
Related
I use bin/post to index all my files in /documents (mounted volume). It works and full-text search works fine.
I do an atomic update for specific metadata that I added to the schema BEFORE posting all docs, it works too.
I do a full-text search to find back the document for which the metadata has been updated, it DOESN'T work anymore, the updates are there but it seems that the full-text index has disappeared.
I do a full re-index and then it overrides my added metadata for the doc, resetting it to the default value. Although the metadata field I added is both stored and indexed.
Not sure what to do. That means that each reindexing will reset my added metadata...not great
The update - under the hood - reconstructs the document from stored fields, applies changes and puts them back to disk. On Lucene level, there is no "document update", it is a higher level concept. That's how the search indexes stay fast in this architecture.
So, your full-text field which is not stored, does not show up in the reconstructed document and does not get stored again in the "updated document".
If you have such a mix of stored and non-stored fields, you have to merge your updates outside of Solr from the original full-content.
Alternatively, depending on your use case, if you are just returning those update values, you could inject them with custom SearchComponent, use ExternalFileField or similar. The user mailing list could be a good place to ask for various options possible.
Is it possible to automatically create an alias on an indexing request for an absent index in elasticsearch instead of creating the index?
For example, let's say an indexing request comes in for the uk_london index, with type document and the document contents. The uk_london index does not exist, so it will be created. I want to avoid this creation, to avoid having a kagillion shards. What I would like is for ES to create an alias uk_london (with routing, filtering etc.) and have it point to the uk index (which already exists).
I know this problem is solvable by changing the way the indexing requests come in. The cluster I am running receives documents from multiple systems. I do not have full control over how the documents are sent and would avoid having to touch everything that talks to it unless I really have to.
I am also aware of index templates and the fact that you can automatically set-up aliases on index creation through them. However, as far as I understand, this does not solve my problem as you can't tell it to create an alias instead of an index.
I have a project completed with Orchard CMS. The all functionalities are implemented through modules. Search module was also working till a few days ago, but suddenly it is stopped to working, "without any reason".
The issue is that I can not rebuild/update indexes. When I run indexing, it will only index default list of fields (id, title, body, format, type, author, created, published, modified, culture) but my custom fields are not indexed.
I tried everything but without any success. I tried:
- Deleting Indexing/Search folder with all files
- Reinstalling Search/Indexing/Lucene modules
- Rebuilding and rebuilding indexes....
- Clearing solution and rebuilding...
I didn't extend any of Orchard modules, they are the same as when I downloaded them.
Any advice on this one...?
P.S. Yes, I already checked custom fields thats need to be indexed. :)
Thanks,
If you think the index is corrupted, delete App_data\Sites\Default\Search.settings.xml and App_data\Sites\Default\Indexes, then restart the app pool. You should then be able to rebuild the index.
Apparently you already did this, but for others who may not have, you also need to check the fields you want indexed under Settings/Search. This will include the fields in search.
But for the fields to be included in search, they need to be indexed first. For this, you need to go to Content/Content Types and edit the content type the fields are on. Check "index this content type for search". Also deploy the settings for each field you want indexed, and check "include in the index".
You'll need to run the "Recipe" to create the "Search" index.
It appears that Search + Lucene + Indexing works with Text Fields but not Numeric Fields.
When the search feature is enabled, the Settings screen in the dashboard displays the fields that will be queried from the index (listed on the Search screen).
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I've been looking for a program to create an index from static webpages. I'm not looking for a program like Solr, or elasticsearch because both are assuming I will be interactively creating an index. I need something that can basically go to a url, and create a search index from the pages that it pulls. It can create the index in whatever way necessary (db, xml, etc.) I just don't need the programs that are so involved with the backend database access and the code, as this search will be very light and mostly for internal purposes, on a site that does not use any of those.
Thanks for any tips that may get me started or answers that will solve my problem!
Investigate Nutch. Nutch can index a URL and what you can index is very configurable.
Once you finish crawling/indexing, that index is searchable. There is no programming involved.
I've a .net web application which uses Lucene.net for company search functionality.
When registered users add a new company,it is saved to database and also gets indexed in Lucene based company search index in real time.
When adding company in Lucene index, how do I handle use case of two or more logged-in users posting a new company at the same time?Also, will both these companies get indexed without any file lock, lock time out, etc. related issues?
Would appreciate if i could help with code as well.
Thanks.
By default Lucene.Net has inbuilt index locking using a text file. However if the default locking mode isn't good enough then there are others that you can use instead (which are included in the Lucene.Net source code).