Sun Microsystems Netscape Enterprise Server, Administrator'S Manual

Page: 403 / 532

Chapter 16, Using Search 403
Indexing Your Documents
Indexing Your Documents
Before users can execute searches, they need a database of searchable data
against which they can target their searches. To do this, you create a database,
called a
collection
,
that indexes and stores information about the documents
such as their content and file properties.
Searches require collections of files upon which to perform their searches.
Once the documents are indexed, their contents and file properties, such as
their titles, creation dates, and authors, are available for searching.
You can add or delete documents from a collection: optimizing, updating, and
managing your collections as needed.
Note
Search cannot work if the web publishing collection (
web_htm
) does not yet
exist or has been deleted. If search does not work, restart the server with the
web publishing function turned on (the default), and try searching again.
About Collections
When your server administrator indexes all or some of a server’s documents,
information about the documents is stored in a collection. Collections contain
such information as the format of the documents, the language they are in, their
searchable attributes, the number of documents in the collection, the
collection’s status, and a brief description of the collection. For more details,
see “Displaying Collection Contents” on page 424.
When you create a collection, you indicate the type of files that it contains:
HTML, ASCII, news, email, PDF, or multiple formats. This determines what
happens during indexing: which attributes are indexed and what, if any, file
conversion has to be done. Files in multi-format collections are converted to
HTML. You can index all the files in a directory or only those with a specific
extension—for example, all the HTML, PDF, or
*.doc
documents.
A collection has records with information about each document that has been
indexed. If the document is deleted from the collection, only the collection’s
entry for that document is removed. The original document is not deleted.
When you have multiple server instances, the collection you create is only
associated with the server instance on which the collection was created.
Therefore, users can only search collections for that server instance.