Additional index configuration options

The Endeca MDEX Platform offers a rich set of index configuration options that allow you to customize your Endeca implementation. You use the index configuration to specify things like search configurations, precedence rules, dynamic business rules, and so on.

The major index configuration features are described in the table below. Refer to other sections of this guide as well as to the Endeca Basic Development Guide and the Endeca Advanced Development Guide for information on all of the features you can choose to implement.

Component	Description	For More Info
Dimension groups	Allow you to organize dimensions into explicit groupings for presentation purposes.	See the "Working with Dimensions" chapter in Endeca Basic Development Guide. See "Configuring Dimension Groups" in the Developer Studio Help.
Search interfaces	Allow you to control record search behavior for groups of one or more properties or dimensions. Some of the features that can be specified for a search interface include relevance ranking, matching across multiple properties and dimensions, and partial matching.	See the "Working with Search Interfaces" chapter in Endeca Basic Development Guide. See "Configuring Search Interfaces" in the Developer Studio Help.
Thesaurus entries	The thesaurus allows the MDEX Engine to return matches for related concepts to words or phrases contained in user queries. For example, an thesaurus entry might specify that the phrase "Mark Twain" is interchangeable with the phrase "Samuel Clemens".	See the "Using Stemming and Thesaurus" chapter in the Endeca Advanced Development Guide. See "Configuring Search" in theDeveloper Studio Help. See the Endeca Workbench Help.
Stop words	Stop words are words that are set to be ignored by the Endeca MDEX Engine. Typically, common words like "the" are included in the stop word list.	See the "Advanced Search Features" section in the Endeca Advanced Development Guide. See "Configuring Search" in Developer Studio Help.
Search characters	Allow you to configure the handling of punctuation and other non-alphanumeric characters in search queries.	See the "Search Characters" chapter in the Endeca Basic Development Guide. See "Configuring Search" in Developer Studio Help.
Stemming	Stemming allows the word root and word derivations of search terms to be included in search results. For example, a search for the term “children” would also consider “child” (which is the word root). This means that singular and plural forms of nouns are considered equivalent and interchangeable for all search operations. Preconfigured stemming files are shipped for supported languages. You cannot modify these files, but you can enable or disable stemming with Developer Studio.	See the "Using Stemming and Thesaurus" chapter in the Endeca Advanced Development Guide. See “Configuring Search” in the Developer Studio Help.
Precedence rules	Allow your Endeca implementation to delay the display of a dimension until the user triggers it, making navigation through the data easier and avoiding information overload.	See "Configuring Precedence Rules" in the Developer Studio Help.
Dynamic business rules	Dynamic business rules allow you to promote contextually relevant result records, based on data-driven rules, to users as they navigate or search within a dataset. For example, you can show a list of best-selling merlots when a user has navigated to a record set made up of merlots. Dynamic business rules make it possible to implement features such as merchandising and content spotlighting.	See "Promoting Records with Dynamic Business Rules" in the Endeca Advanced Development Guide. See "Configuring Dynamic Business Rules" in Developer Studio Help. See "Working with dynamic business rules" in the Endeca Workbench Help.