Understanding PeopleSoft Enterprise Portal Search
This chapter provides overviews of:
PeopleSoft Enterprise Portal search.
PeopleSoft Enterprise Portal search infrastructure.
Search indexes for PeopleSoft applications.
Understanding PeopleSoft Enterprise Portal Search
PeopleSoft Enterprise Portal delivers enhanced search functionality that builds on the PeopleTools search technologies.
PeopleSoft Enterprise Portal search enables users to incorporate additional sources of content into search collections and adds additional features for end users.
Users can perform a search from anywhere in the portal and retrieve links to documents, managed content, websites, and transactions, all in one place.
Searches can be performed across the entire portal or confined to a local site.
Searches can be limited to a predefined scope.
Search results are filtered for security to ensure that users see only content to which they have access.
Content categories are retrieved along with the search results for managed content.
Understanding the Search Infrastructure
The following process occurs when you submit a search request:
A user enters a search request on the Search field located in the portal header frame.
Depending on access security and portal configuration a user can search the entire portal, only the local site, or within a predefined scope.
The query text is submitted to the PeopleSoft web server.
The query string is passed to the Search API.
The results are filtered for security based on the roles defined by the search administrator.
The Search page echoes the user’s original query string and displays a list of content that matches the request.
The search administrator is responsible for defining, building, and maintaining the search indexes, index groups, and index security that are integral to the portal search functionality.
Understanding Search Indexes
A search index is a collection of files that is used during a search to quickly find documents of interest. You build a search index to enable searching on a given set of documents. The set of files that make up the index is a collection. This collection contains a list of words in the indexed documents, an internal documents table containing document field information, and logical pointers to the actual document files. Most content in Enterprise Portal can be searched after creating indexes.
Enterprise Portal uses the PeopleTools search engine to define and build search indexes for use with Portal searches.
Enterprise Portal Search uses three types of search indexes:
Record-based indexes.
Record-based indexes are used to create indexes of data in PeopleSoft tables. For example, if the PeopleSoft application has a catalog record that has two fields, Description and PartID, you can create a record-based index to index the contents of the Description and PartID fields.
HTTP spider indexes.
HTTP spider indexes index a web repository by accessing the documents from a web server. You specify the starting URL, then the spider walks through and indexes all documents in that repository by following the document links. You choose which documents to include or exclude based on file types and Multipurpose Internet Mail Extensions (MIME) types. You can control to what depth the spider traverses.
File system indexes.
File system indexes are similar to HTTP spider indexes, except that the repository that is indexed is a file system. You typically specify the path to a folder or directory, then the indexer indexes all documents within that folder. HTTP spider indexes and file system indexes are sometimes collectively referred to as spider indexes. The indexer recognizes a wide variety of document formats, such as Word or Excel documents. Any document that is in an unknown format will be skipped by the indexer. You choose which documents to include or exclude based on file types and MIME types. You can control to what depth the spider traverses.
See Also
Enterprise PeopleTools 8.50 PeopleBook: System and Server Administration, "Building and Maintaining Search Indexes"
Scoped Search
Scoped search enables users to search within specific portal features, such as Action Items, Calendar, Content Manager, Discussions, Resource Finder, and Workspaces.
Scoped search is available by default in the Home page header. A user can select only one scope at a time.
Search scopes are defined based on index groups.
See Also