Search using external metadata

Scenario:

A custom document type in the repository has an attribute (or set of attributes) that stores a key value. There is an external, custom system containing various additional attributes that can be retrieved by the key value. The data in the external system may change quite frequently.

The goal: to be able to search for the document using Webtop and the external metadata as part of of the search criteria, display the external metadata in search results.

The brute-force approach would be to replicate the external attributes as part of the custom type definition and to have a separate process synchronizing the values with the external system.

Is there another way of doing this? Can Federated Search help? Again, it is like doing two-phase query...

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Comments

DCTM_Guru

Yes, Federated Search is probably the way to go. You would need to build your own custom search adaptor for this external system, but after you have done this, you should be able to "merge" the two result sets.

saladjiev

Could you give me more details on how I'll merge the results using FS, please? Because FS dev guide describes only how to build the adapters, which is half of the task

DCTM_Guru

Sorry, I havent done this before. I think the merging is done via Webtop Extended Search interface.

annetteb

Hello,

Sorry for the late reply.

If you use Federated Search Services (FS2), you don't need to merge the results, FS2 does it for you.

What you need is:

- an adapter to search your external source. Some adapters are available out-of-the-box when you install FS2, others adapters are available on demand and you can build your own adapters if your external source has a Search API.

- configure your adapter, that is, in your configuration, you will indicate which are the atttributes of the external sources that should be queried.

When you run a search in Webtop, select the external source, FS2 will run the query against the external source and returns the results in Webtop result page.

This is a very brief description, let me know if it helps. Also can you tell us what is your external source?

Regards,

Annette