C-Search is a search engine I wrote for Domino. The system crawls Notes databases extracting key information bringing it together into a searchable index that can be replicated as required. Search results include dynamically generated document descriptions with links back to the original documents, file attachments and databases.

This article uses a real life case study to demonstrate how I used C-Search to extend IWWCM search capabilities beyond it's own publishing database without the need to develop search routines inside IWWCM itself.

In this article I assume that you are familiar with IWWCM for Domino and the basics of JavaScript and Domino search techniques.

The requirement for the Education Review Office, New Zealand
The Education Review Office (ERO) is a New Zealand government department whose purpose is to evaluate and report publicly on the education and care of students in schools and early childhood services.

ERO recently redeveloped their Web site, shown in Figure A, using IWWCM and C-Search. The launch of this new Web site is expected after the General Election that is due here in New Zealand later this month. They are now expecting a formal launch date in October.

FIGURE A


ERO recently redeveloped their Web site using IWWCM and C-Search. Roll over picture for a larger image.

The ERO site needed to provide a search facility across 500+ Web content pages and 10,000+ reports. The reports already existed in a Notes database called "Web Reports".

The search needed to be flexible enough to extend to other Notes servers and database with little or no development effort required.

Load Web content and configure IWWCM indexing
We started by building the Web site framework and loading the existing 500+ pages into IWWCM. I then registered the IWWCM publishing database with C-Search. This normally requires two steps:

• Create template details to tell the system what to index and how to display results.
• Register the database and assign it to a template.

However, C-Search is supplied with a sample template for IWCCM so I skipped the first step and went straight to the second step, where I registered the database by creating a "Database" document and assigned it to the IWWCM template. In Figure B, you can see the C-Search database parameters document for the IWWCM publishing database.