The system made it as far as point 6 so I had to wait for that beer after all!

The GSA didn't like my submission, and I didn't know why. All I had to go on was an Http client error in the log telling me that the appliance rejected by the file.

Well, I knew the XML was valid and that it met the Google DTD, so it had to be something else, most likely in how I was managing the file upload itself. I checked my code and scratched around a bit waiting for the inspiration, which didn't come. When that failed, as a last resort I went back to the manual.

Making it all work together
After about half an hour I found the cause of the problem. I was sending the content but I had omitted to send a data source name with the content. The GSA needed this to be able to identify where the content had come from. Problem solved.

This was easily fixed, and five minutes later I tried again. This time, success, document stubs in appeared the Connector's submitted view, as happily shown in Figure D.

FIGURE D


Document stubs appear in the Connectors Submitted items view. Roll over picture for a larger image.

Within 15 minutes the GSA was presenting my Notes database in the search results, as shown in Figure E.

FIGURE E


You can see the Notes database. Roll over picture for a larger image.

For presentation, Google provides what it calls Front Ends. These allow you to manage virtually every aspect of search results presentation. For simple changes, there is page layout helper where you can change the basic objects on the page. For more complex changes though, you need to edit the underlying XSLT code.

I created my own front end by taking a copy of the default style sheet, and then starting hacking (I mean customizing) away. I wanted to be able to support the following features:

• Use the titles and descriptions for Notes hits that were generated by our crawler.
• Show links to any attachments on a Notes document at the bottom of the search result description.
• Show links to parent Notes documents following the automatically generated snippet from any attachment hit.
• Provide links to any other attachment on the same Notes document from an attachment hit.
• Provide a Notes URL to allow the user to open a result in the Notes client as well as the browser.

This may seem tricky, but it wasn't really, and I am no XSLT expert by any means. This is because along with each document and attachment sent to the GSA, the connector sends a predefined set of meta values and the GSA allows these values to be accessed as the search results are served. Meta data values can also be used to implement field level searches across the index.

All of the meta information that I needed for my results layout was available to me as they had all been generated at crawl time. So with a bit of tweaking, and some minor hair pulling I finally had something I was proud of, as shown with Figure F, and I did get that beer after all.

FIGURE F


Notes documents and attachments are shown in customised GSA search results. Roll over picture for a larger image.

In my next article, we'll look at the GSA and the connector integration in a little more detail. I'll cover some of the features offered by the connector and we will see how the two systems work together to respect Notes database and document level security in search results.

Steve Niles is Senior Editor for ZATZ Publishing. He is also an independent filmmaker and freelance writer. For more information, visit http://www.sn-films.com.