[opencms-dev] Offline indexing and searching in OpenCms 7.1

[Jonathan Woods]

I've dug around the source code, and it looks as though everything works as
I'd hoped - thanks, Alkacon.

One comment: it would be nice to be able to control the update
frequency/interval for offline index updating.  [There's a typo in
DEFAULT_OFFLINE_UPDATE_FREQNENCY, btw]

My findings, in case they're of use to others:

1.  Offline resources can indeed be indexed - but only if you set an index's
rebuild mode to 'offline'.  This can't yet be done from the Search
Management view, so you have to edit opencms-search.xml by hand and restart
the server (or otherwise reload configuration).

2.  From a few quick tests, everything works as expected.  I can edit
offline resources, and changes are reflected within seconds.  I can publish
offline resources, then move their containing folder without publishing, and
the right changes are reflected in the offline index (and therefore in
offline search results).

3.  I notice that when you move/rename offline resources, they first
disappear from the offline index, before reappearing a few seconds later as
indexed in the new location.

Jon

> -----Original Message-----
> From: Jonathan Woods [mailto:jonathan.woods at scintillance.com] 
> Sent: 21 October 2008 06:38
> To: 'The OpenCms mailing list'
> Subject: Offline indexing and searching in OpenCms 7.1
> 
> I notice (from the history file) that the next version of 
> OpenCms will come with inbuilt support for offline searching.  Hooray!
>  
> Could someone from OpenCms confirm that offline indexing will 
> behave just like online?  I think it's vital that changes to 
> offline resources can be re-indexed automatically, including 
> updates, deletions, moves and renames, just as with the 
> online site.  Sites with dynamic content relying heavily on 
> Lucene-generated pages are pretty useless if site editors 
> can't see the effects of their work until things are published.
>  
> I've built the latest OpenCms from source code and tried a 
> few quick experiments, but as far as I can tell, offline 
> changes aren't reindexed automatically - offline indexing 
> seems to happen only when resources are published, which just 
> makes the offline index a pointless copy of the online 
> version.  Perhaps I'm missing something.
>  
> It would be great if I and others could ditch the custom 
> indexing code which has been needed to get round this restriction.
>  
> http://www.nabble.com/Improving-usefulness-of-offline-search-i
ndex-td8724519.html
> http://www.nabble.com/Indexing-offline-project---proposal-for-
> more-useful-setting-than-'auto'-td4728177.htm
> 
> Jon
>