Activating Staging Collections

Important: The Collection Broker is not designed to interact with the traditional live/staging model for search collection updates. The Collection Broker is designed to manage large numbers of collections to which data for indexing (and URLs that should be deleted) are pushed directly to a live search collection, rather than being updated in an intermediate location. You should not use the search-collection-push-staging function with search collections that are being managed by the Collection Broker.

As discussed in the Watson Explorer Engine Installation and Integration Guide and the Watson Explorer Engine User Manual, Watson Explorer Engine uses a version of an existing collection, known as a staging collection, as the location in which updates and deletes are actually processed. Once the staging collection is updated, Watson Explorer Engine moves the staging collection to be the collection that is actually responding to incoming queries, and which is therefore known as the live collection.

The Watson Explorer Engine API provides the search-collection-push-staging function (SearchCollectionPushStaging in the C# SOAP API) to enable you to programmatically push the staging version of a collection to be the live version of the collection. An example of the C# version of this API call is the following:

SearchCollectionPushStaging sctl = new SearchCollectionPushStaging();
sctl.collection = "collection517";
port.SearchCollectionPushStaging(sctl);

See the Watson Explorer Engine Installation and Integration Guide or the Watson Explorer Engine User Manual for a detailed discussion of the interaction between a search collection's live and staging directories.