Introduction to the SOIF API

Resource descriptions in the search engine database are described in SOIF, and so are Resource Description Messages (RDMs) that processes can use to exchange resource descriptions across a network.

The SOIF API provides routines for creating and modifying SOIF objects in C.

The SOIF API is defined in the soif.h file in the following directory in your search engine installation directory:

PortalServer-base/sdk/rdm/include

This chapter is restricted to discussing the use of C functions that come with the search engine SOIF API. Therefore, it is strongly recommended that you have a basic understanding of the C programming language.

To correctly support all languages, it is important that all SOIF data should use the UTF-8 character set. Note that UTF-8 is fully backward compatible with 7-bit ASCII SOIF.