Chapter 6. Configuring BDC search

 

This chapter covers

  • Configuring the ADF to allow searching
  • Setting up crawling
  • Building a custom Search page
  • Exploring the search web parts
  • Manipulating the Search API

MOSS 2007 has a fantastic search facility that can not only search documents, list items, and pages stored within SharePoint, but can also search public folders, file shares, and the Business Data Catalog. This gives you a powerful search tool in SharePoint that searches your back-end databases as well. The results link to the Profile page, where all of your actions on the entity will be available.

One of the plus points of the Business Data Catalog is the ability to index and search the back-end database as well as display the data in web parts. MOSS provides additional content sources that can be indexed and searched, whereas WSS is limited to only searching the current site collection. MOSS allows the following content sources: external websites, SharePoint websites, files, Exchange, and business data. In addition to those, you can create or use third-party protocol handlers to allow more content sources. An example of this is Lotus Notes. A Lotus Notes protocol handler was available in SharePoint 2003, which allowed SharePoint to search Lotus Notes databases. Although the Lotus Notes protocol handler is still available for MOSS, the Business Data Catalog has superseded it, because BDC can also connect to Notes databases via ODBC.

6.1. Configuring the ADF to allow searching

6.2. Setting up crawling

6.3. Building a custom Search Results page

6.4. Exploring the search web parts

6.5. Modifying the core Search Results page

6.6. The Search API

6.7. Summary