Search Administration

Note: To complete the procedures in this document, you need to be assigned a role that has the necessary permissions.

Admin users are allowed to administer all aspects of the search engine. These users are allowed access to the administration page of the Search Tool. This page gives these users access to parts of the Search Engine which is used by the Search Tool.

The Administration page shows information about the indexing worker threads in the server cluster, and their state. It also shows information concerning the current index queue.

Image of the search button

Select the Search tool from the Tool Menu of your site.

Note: You must be logged in as an admin user to access the admin Search options.

Click Admin.

Image of admin search button

Site Functions (Rebuild Site Index, Refresh Site Index)

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Site administrators or maintainers are allowed to issue refresh and rebuild commands against the site which they maintain.

  • Rebuild Site Index deletes the index for the current site only, and requests that all tools in the site resubmit all content to the search engine for re-indexing. If you have a large site, this operation may take some time.
  • Refresh Site Index takes all the content in the current site only and refreshes the index for that site. While this command is being enacted upon by the indexer threads, the search index will still contain all of the site content.

Index Functions

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The index queue is a queue of indexing commands that are enacted upon by search indexer threads. These commands take 3 forms.

  1. Global commands that control the whole search engine.
  2. Site wide commands that control the search engine in the context of the current site.
  3. Document commands that inform the search engine of items to be added or removed from the index.

Global Commands (Rebuild Whole Index, Refresh Whole Index)

Only instance administrators are allowed to perform Global operations.

  • Rebuild Whole Index deletes the entire index, and requests that all tools in the system resubmit all content to the search engine for re-indexing. This operation should only be performed with caution, since a large site may take several hours to complete this operation.
  • Refresh Whole Index is only sightly more drastic as it takes all the content known to the search engine, and refreshed the index. While this command is being enacted upon by the indexer threads, the search index will still contain all of the content.

View Search administration information.

Image of index results
  1. The first block of information informs you when the index was last loaded by the Index Searcher on the cluster node you are connected to. It also informs you of current index activity, which may be none if no indexing is being performed, or a indexer thread id and an expected time of completion if there is an index operation in progress. The final information item in this block is the state of the index and the index queue.
  2. Master Control Records informs you of the state of any global commands in the index queue.
  3. Site Control Records informs you of the state of any work site control records in the index queue. This will include commands from sites other than the ones that you maintain.
  4. Index Workers provides a list of all indexer threads in the Sakai cluster. In this list is the ID of the thread, the last time a heartbeat was received, and the current state of the thread, either idle or running. In the thread its ID will be present in the first information block with an estimated time of completion.
  5. Finally there is a block of information about the search index segments that are used by the search engine to store its state.