Users

End users can be authenticated and have their own profiles in Watson™ Explorer Engine.

This feature is required to accomplish certain tasks such as:

Giving access to the Watson Explorer Engine administration tool.
Changing the behavior of the application based on a user profile.
Implementing a search security framework.
Letting end users store login information to access remote resources without having to reenter that information each time.
Letting end users create alerts and email results.
Saving the latest queries that are entered by each end user.

All user information is stored in an XML file (used as a database) named users.xml. This file is located in the data subdirectory of your Watson Explorer Engine installation.

Important: Watson Explorer Engine uses its own internal login/password mechanism for authentication to the Watson Explorer Engine administration tool. Do not attempt to use site-wide authentication mechanisms such as LDAP to authenticate to the Watson Explorer Engine administration tool - doing so prevents some features of this tool (such as the internal documentation search) from working correctly.

Users can be managed from the Watson Explorer Engine administration tool, through bulk importing a user list, or authenticated through a Watson Explorer Engine macro. We recommend adding administrators or test users through the Watson Explorer Engine administration tool, but it is usually not practical to add a large number of users through this method. The authentication method, which can rely on modifying user variables through Watson Explorer Engine XML and an external authentication process (like integrated authentication with Microsoft IIS, or any kind of Apache authentication), is usually recommended.

Tip: Most of the information in this and subsequent sections discusses authentication in regards to accessing the Watson Explorer Engine administration tool. For information on creating search applications that use authentication to show only search results that the user is authorized to access, see Tutorial: Applying Access Controls to Search Results.