Editor’s Note: From time to time while developing with IWWCM, we discover useful gems of knowledge that we think everyone working with IWWCM should know, even if they don’t relate directly to our products. This is one of those nuggets of wisdom that we’d like to share.

IBM Workplace Web Content Management (IWWCM) Version 6 provides a variety of different searching options. These are discussed in the Best practices for using IBM Workplace Web Content Management V6 document, and from a high level are: 

• Workplace Web Content Management API
• WebSphere Portal Search, and 
• Third-party search product

Workplace Web Content Management API

The IWWCM APIs do provide a limited search API. Before investing time in building a search using the APIs, the following points should be considered:

• there is some degree of reinventing the wheel, as the WebSphere Portal Search, and third party search products already provide search.
• the APIs do not provide full content search, instead searches are performed using the Document Ids of meta data (siteAreaIds, categoryIds and keyword ids).

WebSphere Portal Search

Publishing IWWCM Content to the portal search system and integrating this with your WCM system is not immediately obvious, but is explained in the WCM Infocenter.

To make this work you will need to follow steps outlined in the infocenter. Your content will then be regularly crawled by the portal search service, and included in the collections that you have set up. This allows fine grained control on search, including web content in which ever search collections are relevant.

A potential advantage of using this approach is the availability of the content through the Search and Indexing API (SIAPI). This may not work in all portal configurations, and may require troubleshooting to enable.

Third Party Search

A number of third party search options are also available, including IBMs OmniFind, and LuciFind.  These will provide rich search functionality, but require additional purchases, and may have some integration overheads.

Conclusion

There are three main different search options available with IWWCM. The WCM API option is not recommended to be used as it provides limited search options, and requires development of a custom search engine.

The Portal search API will often provide enough search functionality, but it is somewhat limited in the options available, and so a third party search may be required (as noted on this Developer Works forum thread).  While the WCM API provides some search functionality it is not recommended.  The Portal search API is worth considering as a starting point, as it is straight forward to integrate and deploy.  If it does not produce the desired results, a third party search should be used.

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