Configuring wildcard search for a search interface

You can enable wildcard matching for a search interface by adding one or more wildcard-enabled attributes to the search interface.

First, add the desired attributes. Wildcard search can be partially enabled for a search interface. That is, some members of the search interface are wildcard-enabled while the others are not.

Searches against a partially wildcard-enabled search interface follow these rules:

  • The search results from a given member follow the rules of its configuration. That is, results from a wildcard-enabled member follow the rules of wildcard search, while results from non-wildcard members follow the rules for non-wildcard searches.

  • The final result is a union of the results of all the members (whether or not they are wildcard-enabled).

You should keep these rules in mind when analyzing search results. For example, assume that in a partially wildcard-enabled search interface, Property-W is wildcard-enabled while Property-X is not. In addition, the asterisk (*) is not configured as a search character. A record search issued for woo* against that search interface may return the following results:

  • Property-W returns records with woo, wood, and wool.

  • Property-X only returns records with woo, because the query against this attribute treats the asterisk as a word break. However, it does not return records with wool and wood, even though records with those words exist.

However, because the returned record set is a union, the user will see all the records. A possible source of confusion might be that if snippeting is enabled, the records from Property-X will not have wood and wool highlighted (if they exist), while the records from Property-W will have all the search terms highlighted.

To enable wildcard search in a search interface:

  1. Enable wildcard search in text search for members of the search interface. (This is controlled by the mdex-property_TextSearchAllowsWildcards attribute on the PDR, for each attribute member of the search interface).

    Wildcard search in text search can be partially enabled for a search interface. That is, some members of the search interface can be enabled for wildcard search in text search, while the others are not.

  2. Add the desired attributes to the search interface in the RECSEARCH_CONFIG document. For the structure of this document, see the appendix in this guide.
  3. Use the Configuration Web Service or Integrator to send this document to the Oracle Endeca Server. For information, see the section about the Configuration Web Service in this guide, or the Oracle Endeca Information Discovery Integrator User's Guide.