Understanding PeopleSoft Applications Portal Search
This chapter provides overviews of:
PeopleSoft Applications Portal search.
The search infrastructure.
PeopleSoft Applications Portal search indexes.
Scoped search in PeopleSoft Applications Portal.
Application Search in PeopleSoft Applications Portal.
Integrating content ratings into search results.
Understanding PeopleSoft Applications Portal Search
PeopleSoft Applications Portal delivers enhanced search functionality that is built on the Verity search technology delivered in PeopleTools. PeopleSoft Applications Portal search enables users to incorporate additional sources of content into search collections and adds additional features for 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.
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.
Searches can be limited to a predefined scope.
Optionally, search within PeopleSoft Applications Portal can be configured to integrate with Application Search, providing access to search indexes from other content provider systems.
Understanding the Search Infrastructure
The following process occurs when a user submits a search request:
A user enters a search request in the Search field located in the portal header.
Depending on access security and portal configuration, a user can search the entire portal, only the local site, or within a predefined search 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.
See Also
Understanding PeopleSoft Applications Portal 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 PeopleSoft Applications Portal can be searched after creating indexes.
PeopleSoft Applications Portal uses the Verity search engine to define and build search indexes for use with portal searches.
PeopleSoft Applications Portal Search uses three types of Verity 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
PeopleTools 8.52: System and Server Administration PeopleBook, “Building and Maintaining Search Indexes”
Scoped Search in PeopleSoft Applications Portal
Scoped search enables users to search from the portal header within specific PeopleSoft Applications Portal features, such as action items, blogs, calendars, the content management system, discussion forums, workspaces, and so on. PeopleSoft Applications Portal is delivered with scoped search as the default in the portal header.
In the following example, the Portal scope is selected for the scoped search:
Scoped search in the portal header
Search scopes are defined based on index groups and the indexes must be maintained by the portal administrator. In the portal header, a user can select only one scope at a time.
This PeopleBooks set also provides information on submitting searches using scoped search.
See Also
Application Search in PeopleSoft Applications PortalIn PeopleTools 8.52, the PeopleSoft Search Framework was introduced. This search framework consists of PeopleSoft components (pages and records provided by PeopleTools), which provide a centralized interface for configuring PeopleSoft integration with a back-end search engine, creating search artifacts like search definitions, search categories, and building and maintaining search indexes. Oracle Secure Enterprise Search (SES) is the back-end search engine on which the PeopleSoft Search Framework relies.
Along with the search framework, PeopleTools 8.52 also introduced Application Search, which provides a way for a user to search across all or a specific group of search indexes. Application Search is available in the portal header throughout the user's session irrespective of the content the user is accessing in the target frame. It allows the user to search and drill down to a specific row and transaction from the search results without navigating to the classic component search page. In a PeopleSoft Applications Portal environment, Application Search can be configured to search across indexes from multiple content provider systems.
In the following example, Application Search has been configured for a PeopleSoft Applications Portal system, which integrates PeopleSoft Applications Portal's search scopes into the Application Search context. In this example, the Portal scope is selected for the Application Search scope:
Application Search in the portal header
Configuring your PeopleSoft Application Portal system to use Application Search is an optional step in deploying search on your system.
See Also
Configuring PeopleSoft Applications Portal for Application Search
Integrating Content Ratings into Search Results
Select the Include Content Rating Results option on the Installation Options page to indicate that you want to include content ratings results in the search relevance rating. If you don’t select the option, content ratings results are not used in the relevance rating.
See Configuring Installation Options.
Integrating results from content ratings into the Verity search results score enables past input to affect the outcome of searches. If a particular registered content reference was rated highly, it increases the content’s relevance rating on the Search page. The content may be ranked higher or lower than the initial Verity relevance score.
Only results from content ratings feed into the search relevance rating. This feature allows content to be rated between 1 and 5. A rating of 3 is considered average and does not affect the Verity score. A rating of 1 or 2 decreases the Verity score; a rating of 4 or 5 increases it.
This formula is used to calculate the adjusted score:
(Adjusted Score) = (Verity Score) + (0.05 x (Content Ratings Score − 3)) x (1 − Verity Score)
Verity Score represents the unadjusted Verity relevance rating, Content Ratings Score is the content rating (1 through 5). The magnitude of the score adjustment is inversely proportional to the original Verity rating.
The Search page displays the combined relevance score for each result. Only content ratings for the current user are considered when adjusting the score.
See Also