Creating a content search connection

Content View Connectors or Content Search Connector allow you to search content and then take action against the results. They are used by Content Views in Federation to populate results and update indexes as needed.

How to

To create a Content Search Connection:

1. Select Content Search from the navigation menu.

2. Click the Create Content Search Connection button.

3. Fill out the following fields. Most fields with default values will not need to be changed.

   Basic Configuration (Required)

   Options	Description
   Connector ID	A unique identifier for this connection i.e. simflofy_demo (Alphanumeric, dashes and underscore characters only) Note:  Connector ids are how Objective 3Sixty identifies the individual connector when receiving calls from other sources, such as Federation Service. This value must be usable as part of url. Use the description field if you need more than a few letters/numbers to describe the connection. The description shows up with its connectorId across the product.
   Description	The text that will be displayed on drop-downs etc. to identify this connection.
   Type	The type of search connector (Solr, Mongo, Elastic etc.)
   Keep Connection Alive	3Sixty will cache the connection for a given amount of time before discarding it.
   Keep Alive in Milliseconds	How long to keep the connection alive before discarding it (300000 is 5 minutes)
   Security Mode	This is how to authenticate with the back-end search. The most common method is to use the appropriate authentication connection Authentication: Use the Authentication connection to access the server None: Do not use any authentication
   Authentication Connection	If Authentication is chosen for the security mode, select the Authentication connection to use.
   Mapping Type	Select the mapping type you want to use for this connection. Either Single or Group. <to add more info here> Mapping: Select the Mapping or Mapping Group

   Search Configuration

   General Configuration (Required)

   Options	Description
   Collection	The name of the collection to query against. ElasticSearch refers to these and "Indexes", but for our purposes they are collections.
   Sort Field/Order	Will contain the values in your field list. Allows you to choose which field to sort on and whether to sort ascending or descending.
   Facet Fields	Facet fields are simply occurrence counts for the entered fields. Content type counting is the most common example. Facet fields are required for a number of sidebar widgets and tasks.
   Field List	The field values to return in a result set. Similar to the SELECT Field1, Field2 clause in SQL. Tip:  Click the Add All Default Fields Button to add the most commonly used fields.

   Facet Configuration (Optional)

   Option	Description
   Facet Limit	Maximum number of facet values to return.

   Highlighting (Optional)

   Option	Description
   Highlight	Yes if you want contextual highlighting, No otherwise.
   	Comma delimited list of fields for highlighting (i.e. content).
   Highlight Field Length	The maximum number of characters to highlight.

   Result Links (Optional)

   Used on the Discovery UI to determine what to do when a user clicks on the link to the document.

   If Download is selected, the file names in your view will call a document download, much like the Download Widget.

   Select External to setup external links for the search results. For this option you will need to add at least one Result Link.

   To do so click the Add External Link button for the new external link form to pop up. Fill in the following fields and click add.

   Option	Description
   Content Service Connector	External link configurations are grouped by content service connector. This allows documents from different repositories to form different links
   Link Field	The document field that contains relevant information for building the link. Note:  Link Field With Semicolons Due to how certain ids with versions are handled. The value of the link field will be cut off after the first instance of a semicolon(;)
   Link Url	The content of the link field will be appended to this url to create the link.

   Search Security

   Important:  Only one of these options may be selected at a time

   Filter: The authenticated user's group ids and login will be added to each search request. This requires the content to be indexed using the Index User Group Task
   See this example

   Restrict: Only users from the selected groups will be able to use this search connection, regardless of role. If this connection in used as part of a Content View, users outside these groups will not be able to see it in their View List in Discovery. If you do not have any user groups, nothing will show up to select from. Create User Groups

   Connection Configuration

   Individuals connectors might have specific fields that need to be filled out in addition to the basic configuration fields. Refer to the documentation for each connector to see which fields are available.

   Additionally, this is where you can use the "Add Custom Parameter" button to set any default query values for the connection.

   A query_fq configuration param lets you define facet queries behind the scene. This is done to provide limited views or subsets of data in the search. Essentially you could create any number of views on the same date but each view would display different results. This can also be used in a role base system where you have views setup for specific user roles. Unless the fq is already encoded, you will need to wrap it in the encode() function where it will be URLEncoded UTF-8.

   The syntax is:

   query_fq for the first one
   query_fq1 for the second
   etc.

Available Content Search Connectors

OpenSearch Connector

Elasticsearch Connector

MongoDB GridFS Search Connector

MongoDB Search Connector

SOLR Search Connector (End of Life)