Using the Generate WCM Search URL portlet in WCM Support Tools

Introduction

In IBM® WebSphere® Portal / Web Content Manager^TM (WCM) v7, the content source for Portal Search is no longer automatically generated when a Site is made searchable. Since Sites are no longer part of WCM in v7, the content source for crawling WCM content must be manually created.

This article describes the WCM Search URL portlet tool specifically designed to help generate that Seedlist URL and eliminate incorrect formatting.

NOTE: You must be logged in as the Portal Administrator user for this tool to work properly.

Getting started

1. Download the WCMSupportTools.war file from the IBM Support Tools portlet for Lotus WCM Web site.
2. Install the WCMSupportTools.war file into WebSphere Portal, create a page, and add the portlet to the page; the window in figure 1 displays.
3. Select the Generate WCM Search URL option.

Figure 1. WCM Support tools window



4. The window in figure 2 displays. There are four different options, which are based on the seedlist URL formatting options in the WCM v7 InfoCenter topic, “Indexing web content.”

Figure 2. WCMSupportTools Home

The four different types of sites, Stand-alone, Cluster, Virtual Portal, and Virtual Portal with Unique URL, correspond to environments that require slightly different seedlist URL formatting. Within each of those configurations, there are four available options for how you can crawl your content:

• All Libraries
• A Single Entire Library
• Multiple Entire Libraries
• A single SiteArea under a Single Library

Generating a seedlist URL for a standalone environment

In this section we discuss an example for standalone usage, though the steps are quite similar for all the options and are fairly straightforward:

1. After you click the Stand-alone button (recall figure 2), the window in figure 3 displays. Click the Get Libraries button.

Figure 3. Get Libraries button

2. Click the drop-down arrow button (see figure 4), to see the list of available Libraries that you can search, and select the library containing your content that you want to crawl.

Figure 4. Available libraries


3. If you wish to crawl all SiteAreas in a single Library, click the Generate URL button after selecting your Library name. This provides the generated seedlist URL for that single library.
4. Once your library is selected, click the Get SiteAreas button, to build the available SiteAreas list, and click the drop-down arrow button for SiteAreas (see figure 5).

Figure 5. Library selected


5. Select your desired SiteArea from the list; in this case, Articles is selected (see figure 6).

Figure 6. Articles SiteArea selected


6. Now click the Generate URL button; the window in figure 7 displays. You can now copy the generated URL and paste it into your newly created Content Source in your Collection under Manage Search in Portal Administration.

Figure 7. Seedlist URL generated

Generating a seedlist URL for a Virtual Portal

In this section we look at an example of generating the Seedlist URL for a Virtual Portal.

Even though WCM content is not created in a Virtual Portal, in order to search for WCM content within a Virtual Portal, you must create a new collection in the Virtual Portal. This is necessary due to the URL context of the Virtual Portal and the way the search result URLs are formatted.

First, you need to determine the URL context you used from your Virtual Portal by navigating to Portal Administration --- Manage Virtual Portals. Figure 8 shows our example of where you can find the URL context for your Virtual Portal.

You can also see that “SVP” is the URL context for this Virtual Portal, and that the host name was not changed.

Figure 8. Example Virtual Portal



Now let's go through the similar steps that we did for Standalone, to generate a WCM Seedlist URL for a Virtual Portal:

1. Navigate to the page where you have configured your WCM Support Tools portlet and select the Generate WCM Search URL option, seen in the list of tools.
2. Select the Virtual Portal option (see figure 9); the Virtual Portal with Unique URL option is only for when the hostname is different than the base portal (in this example it is not).

Figure 9. Virtual Portal option

3. On the next window (see figure 10), in the Enter the Virtual Portal URL Context field, enter SVP, and then click Continue.

Figure 10.



From here the steps are identical to the Standalone steps:

NOTE: For performance reasons the Library and SiteAreas drop-down lists are not populated until the Get Libraries button or Get SiteAreas button is clicked.

Also, at any time during these steps, you can click the Reset entire portlet button, to take you back to beginning.

1. Click the the Get Libraries button (see figure 12).

Figure 12. Get Libraries button


2. In the next window, click the drop-down arrow button (see figure 13). You will see the list of available Libraries that you can search. Select the library containing your content that you want to crawl.

Figure 13. Available libraries

3. Once your library is selected, click the Get SiteAreas button to build the available SiteAreas list. Select drop-down arrow button for SiteAreas (see figure 14).

Figure 14. Library selected


4. Select your desired SiteArea; in this example, “Articles” is selected (see figure 15).

Figure 15. Articles selected SiteArea


5. Once you've selected your SiteArea, click the Generate URL button; the results shown in figure 16 display.

Figure 16. Results window



Once your Seedlist URL is generated, you can Copy this URL and paste it into your newly created Content Source in your Collection under Manage Search in Portal Administration.

You can see in the URL that the Virtual Portal URL context is included:

Conclusion

The Generate WCM Seedlist portlet was created as a simple serviceability tool to help users properly format their WCM Seedlist URL in WebSphere Portal version 7.x. This document should help you use this tool to make your creation of WCM seedlists more efficient.

Resources

developerWorks IBM Web Content Manager product page:
http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/lotus/products/webcontentmanager/

developerWorks WebSphere Portal zone:
http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/websphere/zones/portal/

developerWorks white paper, “Making content searchable anywhere using IBM WebSphere Portal's publishing Seedlist Framework:” http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/websphere/zones/portal/proddoc/dw-w-seedlist/index.html

WebSphere Portal discussion forum:
http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/forums/forum.jspa?forumID=168&start=0

About the author

Kevin Dillard is a member of the WebSphere Portal Support team based at IBM's Research Triangle Park, NC, facility, where he is currently the Team Lead for the Portal Runtime and Search components. Prior to this, Kevin was a member of the WebSphere Portal and Web Content Management Support teams, working exclusively on critical issues that included travel to customer locations for hands-on assistance. You can reach him at kdillard@us.ibm.com.