About the CAS Server

The CAS Server manages all crawl operations of file system, CMS, and custom data sources. The CAS Server has a WSDL interface and a CAS Server Command Line Utility. The CAS Server runs inside the CAS Service.

The CAS Server has the following characteristics:

Integrates with the CAS Document Conversion Module, which allows the CAS Server to convert binary files (such as Microsoft Word documents and Adobe Acrobat PDF files) into text.
Uses include and exclude filters to specify which files or folders to retrieve or avoid.
Configures the logging behavior for a crawl, including setting the log level for various components and specifying output to the console, to a log file, or to both.
Supports incremental crawls in which the CAS Server processes only the content which has been added, modified, or deleted since the last crawl.
Enables security by supporting the Endeca Access Control System. Each crawl generates access control list (ACL) properties for each record, based on the corresponding properties for each file (for file system crawls) or entry in the CMS repository (for CMS crawls).

The CAS Server also tags the records with metadata properties that are derived from the source documents. After the CAS Server returns the records, you can configure an Endeca record adapter (from Developer Studio) to read the records into your Endeca implementation's pipeline, where Forge processes the records and can add or modify the record properties. These property values can then be mapped to Endeca dimensions or properties by the property mapper in the pipeline. You can then build an Endeca application to access the records and allow your application users to search and navigate the document contents contained in the records.

You can configure the CAS Server to crawl a data source and generate access control list (ACL) properties for each record. These ACL properties can be used in conjunction with security login modules to limit access to records based on user login profiles. For details on using the Endeca Access Control System, see the Endeca Security Guide.