Introduction to the Search API

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

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

The Search API is defined in the search.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 Search 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 Search data should use the UTF-8 character set. Note that UTF-8 is fully backward compatible with 7-bit ASCII Search.