Search Domain Maintenance

A Search Domain is maintained in IFS Solution Manager. All Search Domains are disabled when delivered, meaning that no triggers or scheduled tasks are enabled, nor is the Oracle Text index created. A disabled Search Domain cannot be used to search for business objects in any of IFS Applications clients.

Enabling a Search Domain

A Search Domain is enabled in Solution Manager by scheduling a task that is run once. This is handled by a scheduled task because you probably want to enable a Search Domain when the system is running with low load since it is a high resource consuming operation. Enabling a Search Domain also creates an empty OracleText index. At the same time all rows in the main view if the Search Domain is made unsynchronized. To get all rows indexed you need to synchronize them into the index.

Search Domain Scheduled Tasks

Three Scheduled Tasks manage the following items:

• Synchronizing the Oracle Text index
  If the business object's attributes that are included in the Search Domain are changed, the document is marked to be synchronized by the triggers. This Scheduled Task synchronizes the Oracle Text index. This is a relatively simple and fast procedure for one document, but can of course be a time consuming operation if the Search Domain is big or if there are lots of new, changed or removed documents in the Search Domain. Synchronizing should be done relatively often so that the Search Domain is kept updated with the latest data.
  
  When enabling a Search Domain all rows in the main view is marked as unsynchronized. This means that in order to fill the OracleText index you need to synchronize in all documents.
  
  By default, index synchronization runs every 30 minutes. Depending on how often the indexed data is modified, an administrator may want to adjust this interval. Using Solution Manager, you can find out how many documents are currently "out of sync". Using this information a suitable interval can be decided. It is also possible to restrict the amount of documents that should be synchronized per synchronization. You can set this in the Search Domain detail window.
• Optimizing the Oracle Text index
  Like every other index in an Oracle database, the Oracle Text index will become fragmented over time. Optimization of Oracle Text indexes removes the fragmentation. The frequency for running the Scheduled Task for Optimizing the Oracle Text index is determined by the System Administrator.
  
  By default, index optimization is done once a week.

• Rebuilding the Oracle Text index
  Sometimes one may want to rebuild the whole index (meaning re-indexing all documents within the Search Domain). This should be done when the Search Domain definition has been changed. This is considered to be an operation that would normally not be necessary, so this task can normally be disabled (but by default it is scheduled to run once a month).
  
  There could exist specific search domains where rebuilding of the index is required relatively frequently - refer to any release notes regarding the enabled search domains.

Note! Rebuilding an Oracle Text index means that the related table is locked for DML operations (inserts, updates and deletes). This means that when rebuilding an Oracle Text index, IFS Applications cannot perform business transactions against this table. This task should therefore be scheduled to run at night or during non-peak business hours.

Search Domain triggers

Search Domain triggers are created for the master entity and aggregates to the master maintained within the same entity (meaning that aggregates belonging to other entities don't have triggers automatic created).

The aggregate trigger works in this way - If any attribute, used in the Search Domain, is added, changed or removed the trigger updates the master record meaning that it is marked for synchronizing.