Custom Collection
A custom collection enables you to index and search custom content using the SearchBlox REST-API.
To find your API key, visit the Admin > License page.
To find your SB-PKEY value, SBAdmin or Admin can visit the Admin > Users page.
Creating Custom Collection
- After logging in to the Admin Console, click Add Collection button. The Add Collection screen will be displayed.
- Enter a unique name for your collection (for example, News).
- Select Custom radio button.
- Choose the language of the web pages that you are about to index.
- Click Add to create the collection.
Custom Collection Settings
- The Settings sub-tab holds tunable parameters for the parser, and SearchBlox comes pre-configured with parameters when a new collection is created.
- To learn more details on REST-API, parameters and URLs read REST API.
- The following table has the list of basic settings available in Custom collection
| Setting | Description |
|---|---|
| Keyword-in-Context Display | The keyword-in-context returns search results with the description displayed from content areas where the search term occurs. |
| Boosting | Boost search terms for the collection by setting a value greater than 1 (maximum value 9999). |
| Stemming | When stemming is enabled, inflected words are reduced to root form. For example, "running", "runs", and "ran" are the inflected form of run. |
| Spelling Suggestions | When enabled, a spelling index is created at the end of the indexing process. |
| Logging | When logging is enabled, the indexer activity is available in detail in ../searchblox/logs/index.log |
| HTTP Basic Authentication | When the spider requests a document, it presents these values (user/password) to the HTTP server in the Authorization MIME header. The attributes required for basic authentication are username, password. |
| Proxy Server Indexing | When HTTP content is accessed through proxy servers, the proxy server settings are required to enable the spider to successfully access and index content. The attributes required for proxy server indexing are: Proxy Server URL, Username and Password |
SearchBlox API Explorer
- SearchBlox provides a built-in tool to try out the API with examples called the API Explorer.
- The API Explorer can be accessed using the link:
https://localhost:8443/searchblox/sde/index.jsp - The API Explorer link is also available on the page while selecting the custom collection path setting.
- Using SearchBlox API Explorer, you can make the following REST API requests related to Custom collection
- Index Document
- Delete Document
- Status of Document
- Clear Documents
- Create Collection
- Delete Collection
- To try other API requests please use any API tools such as Postman.
- Providing SB-PKEY is mandatory for all API requests. API Explorer has a Private Key text box to provide SB-PKEY value whereas the Postman header parameter can be used to serve the same purpose.
- The input to this SearchBlox REST-API should be in XML or JSON format
- There is also an option called Load Sample Request for every tab (function).
- The user needs to provide the correct API key, collection name, the right location, etc.
- While indexing, the XML/JSON code is displayed in separate pop-ups, and later the status message is displayed.
SearchBlox also supports HTTP API and many other APIs, however currently they are not compatible with API Explorer. Tools such as PostmanAPI can be used to try out HTTP API.
Updated about 3 years ago