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Search functionality in WebSphere Portal and Lotus Web Content Management
WebSphere Portal and Lotus Web Content Management provide search capabilities
as described in this section. We discuss this within the specific context of
the River Bend corporate Web site. Specifically, within this article, we
discuss:
Full text search (shown in the following figure) is one of the most powerful
tools of a corporate Web site. WebSphere Portal provides a complete search
service with a full text crawler, an indexer, and several components to build
the customized search interfaces.
WebSphere Portal search and Lotus Web Content Management
WebSphere Portal ships an embedded search engine with core search services (see
the following figure):
- Index build component using HTTP crawling techniques
- Text analysis functions, including taxonomy, categorizer, language tools,
and summarizer
- Web-style search of the following items:
- Portal pages and portlets
- Lotus Web Content Management sources
- External Web search sources
- High precision relevance ranking
More than 250 different document formats are supported for index and search via
WebSphere Portal Web crawler. A search service can be deployed on a external
server, which is always required to use searches within a Portal Cluster.
Portal search has a published API, the IBM Search and Index API, to develop
custom search application interfaces. From a user perspective, WebSphere Portal
search provides the following functionalities:
- Administrator: Create and maintain search collections; administration
portlets to configure and schedule content indexing
- User search interface: Search box in the themes and search portlets
(Search and Browse and Search Center)
Portal Search provides specific functions for Web Content Management (WCM):
- Web content indexer to add WCM content to a search index with some
advantages over Web crawling such as the ability to filter the results by using
WCM permissions before they are shown to the user
- User interface components, which are used to build custom search
interfaces
Making River Bend content searchable
The first step River Bend administrators need to make their site searchable is
to configure the Portal Search Service to index the current content. To do
that, they create an instance of the search service, called a search collection
, to handle the indexing process of the existing Web content.
There are two different ways to create such a search collection:
- Automatically: You can create one by running the ConfigEngine. {sh | bat}
action-http-wcm-shared-collection task from the wp_profile_root
/ConfigEngine directory.
- Manually: You can do this by using Portal Administration, browsing
to Search → Manage Search and clicking Collections from All Services as shown
in the following figure.
To create a collection that hosts search indexes, River Bend administrators
click New Collection . They enter the values as shown in the following figure
and click OK .
The system shows a confirmation message, and the new collection is displayed as
shown in the following figure.
A search collection can search through several Lotus Web Content Management
sites. The next step is to configure the River Bend site to be searched in the
new search. Go to the Authoring Portlet, edit the River Bend site, and select
the Searchable check box as shown in the following figure.
After saving the changes for the site, the site is added to the existing Web
content collection as shown in the following figure. River Bend administrators
can go back to the search collection to check it and start the indexing
process.
Adding search components to the River Bend site
As explained in the other sections, River Bend administrators have built a text
index by using the existing Web content. In the steps that follow, we add to
the River Bend Web site the user interface components that are required to
allow users to work with searches. The following tools are the minimum set of
search tools in a Web site:
- A quick search form: This form is displayed on every page of the Web
site. Users can search for it by writing it in a text field and clicking a
button.
- Results page: This page formats and displays the results of the search by
relevance.
- Advanced search forms: With these forms, users can compose more complex
search conditions.
To build these elements, Lotus Web Content Management provides two types of
components:
- HTML components: These components are used to build
search forms that are created just like any other regular HTML form but
including an action that points to an existing content element. This content
element must include a search component in its presentation template.
- Search component: These components are used to format
and display search results. Search components are included as part of a
presentation template. A search component always includes a reference to a
search collection and an HTML design for the results. When a new search is
posted after the search component, the query is processed by the search
collection. Then the results are displayed by using the format defined by the
designers. A search component may optionally include a page navigation
component to navigate the search results by using several pages.
River Bend designers decided to create a set of new items as illustrated in the
following figures:
- Basic search forms that are included on every page of the Web site
- Search component and page navigation component to process searches and
display results
- A generic authoring template to build items that display search results
by combining informational text, a search component, and an advanced search form
- A presentation template to format the search results items
- A content item that receives any request for a search and a site area
that hosts it
Quick search form
The quick search form is included in all content items of the Web site. The
form simply contains a text field and a submit action that sends the form
contents to a content item that includes search components to process the
search and display the results. See the following figure.
Advanced search form
The advanced search form works much like the quick search form. The advanced
search form includes two different forms with the same action that allow two
different kinds of searches:
- Search by type: Allow the user to search all content that is created with
a specific authoring template
- Search by title: Allows the user to search all content that includes a
text pattern in its title
Search results
The search results component is included as part of the search presentation
template in order that it receives the request of the search forms, processes
them by using the Web Content Collection, and formats the results to display
the content title, a summary, and its relevance.
The results are shown to the user by displaying several pages through a page
navigation element.
Search results page navigation
Search results adds page navigation to the display of search results.
Search area
This site area hosts the Results content item and is used to add a Search entry
to River Bend main menu. It includes a mapping between the search authoring
template and the search presentation template.
Search authoring template
By using the search authoring template, the River Bend designer can build any
amount of search result pages by combining a search component, an advanced
search form, and explanatory text.
Search presentation template
The search presentation template is based on the River Bend General
presentation template. It is used to format the components of the search
authoring template.
Search content item
Initially, only one search results page is created.
