Overview

Content Manager OnDemand users primarily search on the metadata, such as extracted index values, that is associated with documents. By using FTS, you can intelligently search through actual document content. To enable FTS, the documents are first parsed and an index is built. This index can then be queried by a full text engine.

The FTS feature of Content Manager OnDemand comes with a separate server, the Full Text Search Server (FTS Server), which handles the text extraction, indexing, and searching of the indexed data. This separate server offloads the processing of full text data to a server other than your Content Manager OnDemand server.

The full text engine is the same search services engine that is used by other IBM products, such as Db2 or IBM FileNet P8. It is based on the Lucene engine and allows advanced and flexible queries. Users can perform wildcard searches, fuzzy or similar searches, proximity searches, Boolean searches, and other complex queries.

The FTS feature can handle many formats, including Microsoft Office documents, XML files, and typical Content Manager OnDemand formats, such as AFP, Line Data, and Adobe Portable Document File (PDF).

The FTS feature supports full text indexing of both new and existing data. For new data, the FTS Server is configured to index the newly loaded reports by using the OnDemand Administrator client. For existing data, indexing is invoked by using the Content Manager OnDemand command-line utilities or the Content Manager OnDemand Web Enablement Kit (ODWEK) Java application programming interface (API).

FTS is enabled through the Content Manager OnDemand folder and allows all clients to take advantage of full text queries after the server configuration is complete. Several Content Manager OnDemand folder field types are defined in support of FTS. Search score, highlight, and summary are returned, aiding the user in determining whether the document is a good match.

Note: Before the release of the FTS feature in Content Manager OnDemand, a document content-based search was possible by using the server-based text search functionality. However, this functionality is limited to AFP, Line, SCS, and PDF documents. It does not use an index, but instead the server retrieves the documents and then scans those documents for the index values. This method limits the capabilities of the functions to exact matches of a query string and might cause workload problems on the Content Manager OnDemand server. FTS eliminates these issues and limitations by introducing new processing components.