Configuring the Work Center Search Engine

Smart Search Settings

Smart Search operates on pre-built indices. For SBM upgrades, the index building begins once Tomcat is started for the first time after you upgrade your installation. The complete indexing operation can take significant time to finish for very large databases; however, some search results in Work Center begin to appear immediately and the number of results continues to grow while the initial indexing operation works toward completion.

Indexing is also performed on information in most file attachments that contain text (PDF and Microsoft Word, for example). For large documents, only the first 1 million characters are indexed and searchable.

You can view the overall progress of the indexing operation in the ssf.log file located on the server that hosts SBM Common Services. The log file is located here:

installDir\SBM\Common\tomcat\server\default\logs

Use the following options to configure Smart Search Settings :

• Indexer directory path

  Specify a directory to host the Smart Search index files. The index files are used to enhance the searches that users perform in the browser. To increase the overall search response time, consider hosting the indexer on a separate dedicated host machine.

  Important: If you host the indexer on a separate server, you must enter the UNC path and ensure that the Tomcat user identity has full permissions to the specified directory. Click Test to verify that the directory is accessible.

  You can increase scalability and improve search query throughput by clustering the SBM Common Services component on multiple servers. For more information about creating a cluster, see Clustering Server Components.

  If you configure Smart Search settings in a Tomcat cluster with multiple instances of SBM Common Services, note the following important information:

  • The indexer directory must be hosted on a server that is outside of the cluster.
  • This server must be accessible to all of the SBM server components in the cluster. This means that the same network path must be specified identically on each node in the cluster.
  • Each node in the cluster must contain identical Smart Search configuration settings; therefore, it is recommended that you configure the Smart Search settings on one node, export the settings to a snapshot configuration file, and then import the file into the other nodes in the cluster. This ensures that all nodes in the cluster contain identical Smart Search settings.
  • The indexer directory must be shared using simple file sharing in Windows (not advanced sharing).
• Expected search usage

  Smart Search adjusts internal parameters accordingly depending on how often your users perform searches. Select a usage indicator to control how many threads are spawned to perform indexing.

  Tip: The Medium setting should be sufficient, unless a very high volume of data is being added to the system (greater than 60 items per second).
• Database polling interval

  Select a polling interval to control how often the service should poll the database to learn about new search strings and new related articles.

  Note: The default Smart Search polling interval is 30 seconds; this means that by default, Work Center searches will return related items 30 seconds after the items have been created. If you change the polling interval to Never, search results in Work Center do not return results for items that are created after this change. Consider lowering the interval to 5 or 10 seconds to find newly-submitted items in search results sooner.
• Re-Index

  Use this option to reset the indexer. This operation cleans the current index by removing learned search strings and related articles that have been saved in the index.

By default, archived items are not indexed and therefore do not appear in Work Center search results when a user searches the Archive. To enable indexing for archived items, set lucene.indexArchivedTables to true in the config.properties file on the SBM Common Services server here:

installDir\SBM\Common\tomcat\server\default\webapps\commonsvc\WEB-INF\classes

Once this change is made, you must perform a full re-index using SBM Configurator before archived items appear in Archive search results. Note that any items that are archived after the reindex is finished will still appear in Local and Global search results until the automatic reindex check process completes; similarly, any items restored from the archive will appear in Archive search results. By default, the automatic reindex process runs daily at midnight. You can change this as needed by altering the spring cron expression in the ssf-config.xml file here:

installDir\SBM\Common\tomcat\server\default\webapps\commonsvc\WEB-INF\classes

This means any newly-archived or newly-restored items will appear in the proper search results area after the automatic reindex is finished.

Attachment Directory Access

SBM Common Services returns attachments for searches that are performed by users in Work Center. If your SBM item attachments are stored in the database, Work Center will access the database to return file attachments in search results, and no additional configuration is necessary in SBM Configurator. However, if your SBM item attachments are stored on the file system, you must provide the attachments directory and access information to SBM Common Services.

To configure attachment access information for SBM Common Services:

1. Enter the location of the attachments directory. The path might be different than what is specified in SBM System Administrator, but the ultimate location must be the same attachments directory.
   For example, you can specify a shared network drive:

   \\serverName\file_attachments

2. Enter the authentication credentials in the User and Password fields.

   If you did not enter credentials in SBM System Administrator because the attachment directory is on the same server, select the check box to use the current Tomcat identity to access the attachments directory. If the attachments directory is located on a remote server, you must ensure that the current Tomcat identity has permissions to the directory.