The end-user search interface for iPlanet Compass Server is created with templates, giving you a great deal of control over the presentation of the search page and the results page.

The following tasks are available for configuring the user interface:

To customize the templates or create entirely new user interfaces, you need to do some programming, as described in the Compass Server Programmer's Guide.

The Search Preferences form allows you to configure different aspects of the end-user search screen.

The end-user configuration options are:

To set search preferences, do the following:

If you change the Template option, you will also need to restart the server.

iPlanet Compass Server comes with several standard sets of user interface templates. By default, it uses a search-and-browse set.

To choose a different search/browse template, do the following:

You can choose from the following standard sets of templates:

Template	Description
Search Only (default)	Uses the simple search interface as the default, providing a link to the Advanced Search screen.
Search Only (advanced)	Uses the Advanced Search interface as the default, providing a link to the simple search screen.
Search and Browse	Provides both simple searching and category browsing.
Search and Browse (advanced)	Provides for Advanced Search with category browsing enabled.
Example: Simple Search Only	A very simple template with only simple searching enabled. Uses no JavaScript.

Choosing a search-only template removes all reference to categories and subcategories from the search screen, including disabling the Browse Categories button.

You can also create your own search and browse templates or modify the ones provided with the server. This process is described in the Compass Server Programmer's Guide.

The Compass Server tracks the searches users make, and can generate a sorted list indicating the kinds of searches that are being performed. You can generate this report both to track the search patterns of your users and to provide feedback to server users.

The server maintains only the most recently generated report, so you should periodically run the statistics report to update the results.

To generate search statistics, do the following:

It is helpful for a search service such as the Compass Server to provide some information about the contents of its database, so that users can set their expectations about what they can search for and the kind of results to expect.

In its default configuration, the Compass Server provides an About Compass button across the bottom of each user screen, which links to a standard "about" screen.

The contents of the about screen for the Compass Server are controlled by the HTML file called about.html in the server's document directory. You can edit the file with any standard HTML editor.

The default about.html contains an "About Compass" heading, followed by links to one or both of the following reports, if they exist:

If either of the reports has not been generated, the link to it will not appear. If you provide that information to users, you should keep the reports up-to-date, for instance by running the database analysis report after each robot run.

The default about screen also contains a link to authoring guidelines that tell document authors how the Compass Server indexes their documents.

You should customize the text on the about screen to indicate in general terms what is in the system. For example, you might include some of the following:

You can incorporate this information in the about.html file in your server's document directory. The server includes all the text of file, and uses special comment lines to indicate where to include the query and site reports, if at all.