Kino Search Engine Add-On
KinoSearch is a Perl implementation of Lucene search engine (implemented
in Java). This is the base of this indexed search engine for TWiki. With KinoSearch you create an index over all webs including attachments like Word, Excel and PDF. Based on that you get a really fast search over all topics and the attachments. You need this add-on
- if your TWiki has grown so big, that normal search is too slow or
- if you want to do search not only on the topics but also the attachments.
Screenshot of a search results list
Usage
See the
KinoSearch topic for a quick Usage and setup.
Searching with kinosearch
The
kinosearch
script uses a template
kinosearch.pattern.tmpl
(if you use the pattern skin). There is also a
KinoSearch topic with a form ready to use with the
kinosearch script.
If you have enabled the
SearchEngineKinoSearchPlugin, you can use the rest handler either from a URL (this works only for a smaller TWiki), or the command line. The syntax is identical to the
kinosearch
script.
The following form submits text to the
kinosearch
script. The installation instructions are detailed below.
KINOSEARCH tag
If
SearchEngineKinoSearchPlugin is enabled, you will be able to use the KINOSEARCH tag to search indexed topics and attachments:
-
%KINOSEARCH{'Search String' format='Formatting string'}%
format takes the following variables to place content.
- $icon - An icon to display filetype when showing attachments
- $match - The Twiki Name of the page being displayed
- $locked - Show if a page is locked
- $texthead - Summary text
See:
SearchEngineKinoSearchAddOn and
SearchEngineKinoSearchPlugin
(experimental) Integrating KinoSearch into TWiki's internal SEARCH
By setting
$TWiki::cfg{RCS}{SearchAlgorithm} = 'TWiki::Store::SearchAlgorithms::Kino';
(a setting in the
Store settings section in
configure
),
TWiki will use the
KinoSearch index for any inbuilt search (including
WebSearch) that it can (for regex searches it will fall back to the
Forking
search algorithm).
If you want TWiki's
WebSearch to also show you attachment results (when you select the 'Both body and title' option), you need to also set
{SearchEngineKinoSearchAddOn}{showAttachments}=1
, and add
kino
to the front of your
SKIN
setting.
The reason this feature is experimental, is that kinosearch does not do partial matching, so searching for
TAG
will not match text like
%TAG{"something"}%
, only instances where the word TAG is seperated by whitespace. TWiki's SEARCH expects total partial matching.
Query syntax
- To search for a word, just put that word into the Search box. (Alternatively, add the prefix
text:
before the word.)
- To search for a phrase, put the phrase in "double quotes".
- Use the
+
and -
operators, just as in Google query syntax, to indicate required and forbidden terms, respectively.
- To search on metadata, prefix the search term with
field:
where <field> is the field name in the metadata (for instance, author).
NOTE: KinoSearch tries to split the single words from composed
things. Thus it reads "something-combined-together" as three words:
"something combined together". The same is true for combinations with
underscore. Thus "something_with_underscore" will be treated as
"something with underscore". This feature is extremely usefull, as you
can search for the single words and need not know the complete word
(Note: KinoSearch has no possibility to search with wildcards!). But
of course you need to know about it. If you want so search for
"something-combined-together", you need to search for "something
combined together". If you add also the " to the search string, you
are sure, that the three words are in that order one after the other.
Query examples
-
text:kino
or just kino
-
text:"search engine"
or just "search engine"
-
author:MarkusHesse
— note that to search for a TWiki author, use their login name
-
form:WebFormName
to get all topics with that form attached.
-
CONTACTINFO:MarkusHesse
if you have declared CONTACTINFO
as a variable to be indexed
-
type:doc
to get all attachments of given type
-
web:Main
to get all the topics in a given web
-
topic:WebHome
to get all the topics of a given name
-
+web:Sandbox +topic:Test
to get all the topics containing "Test" in their titles and belonging to the Sandbox web.
Note: The current version of KinoSearch does not support wildcards.
RSS Feeds
RSS 2.0 feeds can be set up for any search results. To access the feed append
&rss=on;skin=none
to the end of the search url. There is a link to the feed from the results page in the default templates.
Indexing
Note: The
kinoindex
,
kinoupdate
and
kinosearch
scripts will be deprecated over time in favour of the restHandlers, both for security reasons, and to make compatibility with TWiki 5.0 easier.
Creating a new Index
Each topic's text body, title, form fields and attached documents are indexed.
You should run this script manually after installation to create the index files used by KinoSearch.
You can also schedule a weekly or monthly crontab job to create the index files again, or execute it manually when you take down your server for maintenance tasks. To prevent browser access, it has been placed out of the public bin folder.
-
cd twiki/kinosearch/bin ; ./kinoindex
If you have enabled the
SearchEngineKinoSearchPlugin, you can use the rest handler either from a URL (this works only for a smaller TWiki), or the command line
Updating your Index
The
kinoupdate
script uses the web's
.changes
files to know about topic modifications.
Also, a
.kinoupdate
file is used on each web directory storing the last timestamp the script was run on it.
So when this script is executed, it first checks if there are any topic updates since last execution.
The most recent topic updates are removed from the index and then reindexed again.
-
cd twiki/kinosearch/bin ; ./kinoupdate
If you have enabled the
SearchEngineKinoSearchPlugin, you can use the rest handler either from a URL (this works only for a smaller TWiki), or the command line
This script should be executed by an hourly crontab. As before, this script has been placed out of the public bin folder.
# m h dom mon dow command
35 * * * * cd /path/to/you/twiki/bin ; ./rest SearchEngineKinoSearchPlugin.update
You can also optionally use
SearchEngineKinoSearchPlugin's updateHandlers to automatically update the index whenever a topic is modified (or an attachment uploaded) by setting
{SearchEngineKinoSearchPlugin}{EnableOnSaveUpdates}
to true in the
Extensions section of configure.
Warning this can cause topic saves and attachments to become unacceptably slow, as the index update happens before the browser operation has completed.
Attachment file types to be indexed
All the PDF, HTML, DOC, XLS and text attachments are indexed by default. If you want to override this setting you can use a TWiki preference
KINOSEARCHINDEXEXTENSIONS
. You can copy & paste the next lines in your
Main.TWikiPreferences topic
* KinoSearch settings
* Set KINOSEARCHINDEXEXTENSIONS = .pdf, .html, .txt, .doc, .xls
or whatever extensions you want. If you add other file extensions, they are treated as ASCII files. If needed, you can add more specialised stringifiers for further document types ( see
Indexing further document types).
Indexing of form fields
All form fields are indexed. For this, the form templates are checked and the included fields are indexed. Additionally the name of the form of a topic is stored in the field
form_name
. How to search for this is described below.
Note: With
kinoupdate
only the form fields that existed at the
time the initial index was created are indexed. Thus if you add a
form or if you add a new field to an existing form, you should create a new index with
kinoindex
.
Indexing further document types
The indexing of attached documents is realised in two steps:
- the content of the document is changed to an ASCII string. This is called stringification.
- this ASCII string is indexed with KinoSearch. This is the normal way in all index applications.
To index different types of documents, it is necessary to have
specialised stringifiers, i.e. classes to extract the ASCII text out
of the document. In this add-on, a plug-in mechanism is implemented,
so that additional stringifiers can be added without changing the
existing code. All stringifier plugins are stored in the directory
lib/TWiki/Contrib/KinoSearch/StringifierPlugins
.
You can add new stringifier plugins by just adding new files here. The minimum things to be implemented are:
- The plugin must inherit from
TWiki::Contrib::SearchEngineKinoSearchAddOn::StringifyBase
- The plugin must register itself by
__PACKAGE__->register_handler($application, $file_extension)
;
- The plugin must implement the method
$text = stringForFile ($filename)
Then you should add to the list in
KINOSEARCHINDEXEXTENSIONS
in
TWikiPreferences. Now
the defined document type should be indexed and the new stringifier should be used.
NOTE: If you just extend the list without having a special stringifier
in place, this document type is treaded like an ASCII file. For binary
document types, this may lead to problems (inpropper search results,
long indexing times and potential indexing break downs).
Add-On Installation Instructions
Note: You do not need to install anything on the browser to use
this add-on. The following instructions are for the administrator who
installs the add-on on the server where TWiki is running.
Backend for indexing Word documents
Install a backend to stringify Word documents if you want to index
Word documents. For this either install antiword, abiword or wvWare.
Note: This add-on comes with stringifiers for all three of
them. Depending on what is installed, the right stringifiers is used.
Note2: If you install more than one of the three backends, you must select one of them in the configure
{SearchEngineKinoSearchAddOn}{WordIndexer}
setting.
Note2: If you do not install any of the mentioned backends, you
should remove
.doc
from the
KINOSEARCHINDEXEXTENSIONS
variable.
To install antiword for Debian you can:
To install abiword for Debian you can:
To install wvWare for Debian you can:
Backends for PDF, PPT
Install xpdf and ppthtml, if you want to index attached PDF and PPT files:
- For Debian you can use
apt-get install xpdf-utils ppthtml
- If you do not install
xpdf
, you should remove .pdf
from the KINOSEARCHINDEXEXTENSIONS
variable.
- If you do not install
ppthtml
, you should remove .ppt
from the KINOSEARCHINDEXEXTENSIONS
variable.
Installation of additional CPAN modules
You need to install the following modules: KinoSearch,
File::MMagic, Module::Pluggable, HTML::TreeBuilder and
Spreadsheet::ParseExcel
You can do that by running:
perl -MCPAN -e "install KinoSearch"
perl -MCPAN -e "install File::MMagic"
perl -MCPAN -e "install Module::Pluggable"
perl -MCPAN -e "install HTML::TreeBuilder"
perl -MCPAN -e "install Spreadsheet::ParseExcel"
perl -MCPAN -e "install CharsetDetector"
perl -MCPAN -e "install Encode"
Note for Windows: For Windows, make sure you have a C-compiler in place. This is normally part of Visual Studio etc.
Installation of the add on itself
Like many other TWiki extensions, this module is shipped with a automatic installer script written using the
BuildContrib?.
- If you have TWiki 4.1 or later, you can install from the configure interface (Go to Plugins->Find More Extensions)
- The webserver user has to have permission to write to all areas of your installation for this to work.
- If you have a permanent connection to the internet, you are recommended to use the automatic installer script
- Just download the BuildContrib?_installer perl script and run it.
- Notes:
- The installer script will
- copy files into the right places in your local install (even if you have renamed data directories),
- check in new versions of any installed files that have existing RCS histories files in your existing install (such as topics).
- If the $TWIKI_PACKAGES environment variable is set to point to a directory, the installer will try to get archives from there. Otherwise it will try to download from twiki.org or cpan.org, as appropriate.
- (Developers only: the script will look for twikiplugins/BuildContrib/BuildContrib.tgz before downloading from TWiki.org)
- If you don't have a permanent connection, you can still use the automatic installer, by downloading all required TWiki archives to a local directory.
- Point the environment variable $TWIKI_PACKAGES to this directory, and the installer script will look there first for required TWiki packages. # $TWIKI_PACKAGES is actually a path; you can list several directories separated by :
- If you are behind a firewall that blocks access to CPAN, you can pre-install the required CPAN libraries, as described at http://twiki.org/cgi-bin/view/TWiki/HowToInstallCpanModules
- If you don't want to use the installer script, or have problems on your platform (e.g. you don't have Perl 5.8), then you can still install manually:
- Download and unpack one of the .zip or .tgz archives to a temporary directory.
- Manually copy the contents across to the relevant places in your TWiki installation.
- Repeat from step 1 for any missing dependencies.
- use
configure
to configure the advanced features
- enable SearchEngineKinoSearchPlugin
-
{SearchEngineKinoSearchAddOn}{showAttachments}
-
{SearchEngineKinoSearchPlugin}{EnableOnSaveUpdates}
-
{SearchEngineKinoSearchAddOn}{WordIndexer}
-
$TWiki::cfg{RCS}{SearchAlgorithm} = 'TWiki::Store::SearchAlgorithms::Kino';
- Set SKIN=kino,tagme,pattern
%$INSTALL_INSTRUCTIONS%
Configuration
This add-on uses several preferences which should be set at
Main.TWikiPreferences. All these preferences are optional. If you are fine with the default values given below, you need not change anything.
(Note, these are not where the defaults are set)
* KinoSearch settings
* Set KINOSEARCHINDEXEXTENSIONS = .pdf, .doc, .xml, .html, .txt, .xls, .ppt
* Set KINOSEARCHSEARCHATTACHMENTSONLY = 0
* Set KINOSEARCHSEARCHATTACHMENTSONLYLABEL = Display only attachments
* Set KINOSEARCHINDEXSKIPWEBS = Trash, Sandbox
* Set KINOSEARCHINDEXSKIPATTACHMENTS = Web.SomeTopic.AnAttachment.txt, Web.OtherTopic.OtherAttachment.pdf
* Set KINOSEARCHANALYSERLANGUAGE = en
* Set KINOSEARCHSUMMARYLENGTH = 300
* Set KINOSEARCHDEBUG = 0
* Set KINOSEARCHMAXLIMIT = 2000
You can also
configure
(The Extensions:SearchEngineKinoSearchAddOn section) where the index and log files are created.
Note: The directories must exist.
$TWiki::cfg{KinoSearchLogDir} = '/home/httpd/twiki/kinosearch/logs';
$TWiki::cfg{KinoSearchIndexDir} = '/home/httpd/twiki/kinosearch/index';
Remember to edit the file
kinosearch/bin/LocalLib.cfg
and modify
twikiLibPath
accordingly to your configuration
Test of the installation
- Test if the installation was successful:
- Check that
antiword
, abiword
or wvHtml
is in place: Type antiword
, abiword
or wvHtml
on the prompt and check that the command exists.
- Check that
pdftotext
is in place: Type pdftotext
on the prompt and check that the command exists.
- Check that
ppthtml
is in place: Type ppthtml
on the prompt and check that the command exists.
- Change the working directory to the
kinosearch/bin
twiki installation directory.
- Run
./kinoindex
- Once finished, open a browser window and point it to the
TWiki/KinoSearch
topic.
- Just type a query and check the results.
Test of stringification with ks_test
Some users report problems with the stringification: The
kinoindex
scipts fails, takes too long on attachments or
kinosearch
does not yield correct
results. Some times this may result from installation errors esp. of
the installation of the backends for the stringification.
ks_test
give you the opportunity to test the stringification in
advance.
Usage:
ks_test stringify file_name
(I plan to extend ks_test, but at the moment the only possible second
parameter is stringify).
In the result you see, which stringifier is used and the result of the
stringification.
Example:
/home/httpd/twiki/kinosearch/bin$ ./ks_test stringify /home/httpd/twiki_svn/SearchEngineKinoSearchAddOn/test/unit/SearchEngineKinoSearchAddOn/attachement_examples/Simple_example.doc
Used stringifier: TWiki::Contrib::SearchEngineKinoSearchAddOn::StringifyPlugins::DOC_antiword
Stringified text:
Simple example Keyword: dummy Umlaute: Größer, Überschall, Änderung
You see that the stringifier DOC_antiword is used and the resulting
text seems to be O.K.
Add-On Info
- Set SHORTDESCRIPTION = Fast indexed SEARCH of topics and attachments (eg Word, Excel, PDF and PPT)
Add-on Author: |
TWiki:Main/MarkusHesse and TWiki:Main.SvenDowideit |
Add-on Version: |
%$VERSION% |
Update note |
If you update from an older version to v1.15 or higher, remove the old index and create a complete new one with kinoindex |
Change History: |
|
20 Aug 2008: |
v 1.18, added Integrated SEARCH, SearchEngineKinoSearchPlugin, restHandlers, updated code and tests -- TWiki:Main.SvenDowideit |
6 Aug 2008: |
v 1.17, Bugs:Item5717: persist use form choices, Bugs:Item5647: cope better with attachment problems -- TWiki:Main.SvenDowideit |
4 Jun 2008: |
v 1.16, Bugs:Item5646: Problem with attachments with capital letter suffix |
12 May 2008: |
v 1.15, Bugs:Item5579, Bugs:Item5580, Bugs:Item5619: Problem with ALLOWWEBVIEW and Forms fixed |
23 Apr 2008: |
v 1.14, Bugs:Item5273, Bugs:Item5546, Bugs:Item5550, Bugs:Item5552: Use current user in search script |
27 Jan 2008: |
v 1.13, Bugs:Item5271: Option "show locked topics" now works |
19 Jan 2008: |
v 1.12, Bugs:Item5270: Enhancement of stringifiers |
19 Dec 2007: |
v 1.11, Additions on stringifiers, modification of output format |
17 Nov 2007: |
v 1.10, PPT stringifier added |
11 Nov 2007: |
v 1.09, Some bugfixing |
3 Nov 2007: |
v 1.08, Some bugfixing |
7 Oct 2007: |
v 1.07, Some bugfixing |
6 Oct 2007: |
v 1.06, Upgrade for 4.1, Release with BuildContrib |
29 Sep 2007: |
v 1.05, Indexing of form fields |
16 Sep 2007: |
v 1.04, Stringifier plugins for doc, xls and html |
13 Sep 2007: |
v 1.03, Indexing of PDF and TXT attachments |
08 Sep 2007: |
v 1.02, Index and update script enhanced |
24 Aug 2007: |
v 1.01, Update script included, Result uses highlighter |
14 Aug 2007: |
Initial version (v1.000) |
CPAN Dependencies: |
CPAN:KinoSearch |
|
CPAN:File::MMagic |
|
CPAN:Module::Pluggable |
|
CPAN:HTML::TreeBuilder |
|
CPAN:Spreadsheet::ParseExcel |
|
CPAN:CharsetDetector |
|
CPAN:Encode |
Other Dependencies: |
pdftotext (part of xpdf-utils) |
|
antiword, abiword or wvWare |
|
ppthtml |
Perl Version: |
Tested with 5.8.0 |
License: |
GPL |
Add-on Home: |
http://TWiki.org/cgi-bin/view/Plugins/SearchEngineKinoSearchAddOn |
Feedback: |
http://TWiki.org/cgi-bin/view/Plugins/SearchEngineKinoSearchAddOnDev |
Appraisal: |
http://TWiki.org/cgi-bin/view/Plugins/SearchEngineKinoSearchAddOnAppraisal |