topic Re: How does Alfresco's content indexing work? in Alfresco Archive

How does Alfresco's content indexing work?

siquser — Wed, 10 Dec 2008 23:50:25 GMT

We uploaded MSWord and MSExcel documents. When I search for the text that are within these documents, SEARCH does not show any resultNot that we are saying SEARCH does not work, b'cos we have tested SEARCH for TEXT data & it has worked in the past, and also we have searched for text from the MS

Re: How does Alfresco's content indexing work?

t_broyer — Thu, 11 Dec 2008 10:51:40 GMT

What we are un-sure is, how long does it take for the INDEXING server to kick-in once the file is uploaded.

It's (almost) instantaneous (though done asynchronously: your don't have to wait for the indexing to be finished to continue using the app).
In the context of Alfresco Explorer (/alfresco webapp), as soon as the server sent you the web page, indexing is running.

In our case it was a very small file & data within the file is very minimal, still SEARCH does not feed the result & we have been waiting for 20-30 minutes since the time we uploaded the file. We grabbed the content of this MSWord file & uploaded the content as TEXT file & then searched, the result was instanteneous.

Did you install and configure OpenOffice on your server? Alfresco uses OpenOffice to convert the office files (including MSOffice documents) to plain text.
Obviously, a plain text file does not need such a transformation, hence the positive results.

Re: How does Alfresco's content indexing work?

siquser — Thu, 11 Dec 2008 20:13:39 GMT

It's been over a day now from the time i uploaded the MS Office Files, and I still don't see my file as result of Search, so I'm pretty curious understanding what i'm missing

My files were MS-Office files & NOT Open Office files, un-sure how installing Open Office makes a difference. Please help me understand. BTW, I do have Open Office installed

Am I missing something?

Re: How does Alfresco's content indexing work?

mikeh — Thu, 11 Dec 2008 20:29:07 GMT

We use OpenOffice on the server because it does an excellent job of reading Microsoft Office documents and saving them as PDF - no need to reinvent the wheel!

You need to ensure the Alfresco server can connect to OpenOffice on startup. Check the log for details.

Mike

Re: How does Alfresco's content indexing work?

_sax — Sun, 14 Dec 2008 18:23:42 GMT

As I mentioned over here, there is also an issue with 3.0 and searching for me
http://forums.alfresco.com/en/viewtopic.php?f=9&t=15814.
Could this be related to a specific OpenOffice version one should have? I used 2.0 x64 which worked well with Alfresco 2.1 and 2.9b.

Re: How does Alfresco's content indexing work?

siquser — Wed, 17 Dec 2008 02:27:11 GMT

Still no luck with Search Result:

We are using Open Office 3.0; as said earlier, we were uploading MS-WORD & MS-Excel file so i'm not sure what is the relationship between Microsoft Files & Open Office Files, those are 2 seperate file types and there should be no dependencies. WHich means SEARCH should not be impacted.

Do we have to install MS-Office on our Alfresco server, I dont think we need to, but just checking.

Re: How does Alfresco's content indexing work?

t_broyer — Wed, 17 Dec 2008 08:55:56 GMT

as said earlier, we were uploading MS-WORD & MS-Excel file so i'm not sure what is the relationship between Microsoft Files & Open Office Files, those are 2 seperate file types and there should be no dependencies. WHich means SEARCH should not be impacted.

it's not about Open Office files (Open Document Format actually, an OASIS standard, nothing to do with Open Office except that Open Office uses this format by default) but Open Office, the office suite, which is able to open MS Office files and save them into other formats; that is, Open Office can be used to transform an MSOffice file into a plain text file.

…and that's what Alfresco does under the hood: it calls an Open Office instance and asks it to transform your MS Office file into a plain text file; which one is then passed to Lucene for indexing.

That being said, I'm not enough of an expert in Alfresco installation to help you; but probably Alfresco cannot launch and connect to the Open Office.

Re: How does Alfresco's content indexing work?

siquser — Wed, 31 Dec 2008 00:24:19 GMT

1. We tried SEARCH on all MS-Office 2003 Documents. It works for Word, Excel, Visio. Does not work for Power-point

2. We tried SEARCH on all MS-Office 2007 Documents. It DOES NOT work

Any idea, if there is any specific issue with MS-Office 2007?

Re: How does Alfresco's content indexing work?

t_broyer — Mon, 05 Jan 2009 09:09:44 GMT

The file types for OpenXML documents (MS Office 2007) are missing from alfresco/WEB-INF/classes/alfresco/mimetype/openoffice-document-formats.xml.

You obviously need a version of OpenOffice that supports OpenXML documents (version 3.0.0 does)

If I were you, I'd search if this issue has already been reported at http://issues.alfresco.com and otherwise file the bug.

Re: How does Alfresco's content indexing work?

siquser — Mon, 05 Jan 2009 19:44:21 GMT

Hi t.broyer

1. We have OpenOffice 3.0 installed on the server where Alfresco installed and I had mentioned about the same back on 16 Dec 2008 (please refer forum thread above)
2. Looks like same problem has been reported by "_sax" on 14 Dec 2008 (please refer forum thread above)

I will try searching more on "http://issues.alfresco.com" to see if this bug has been already reported/recorded

Thanks

Re: How does Alfresco's content indexing work?

javauser007 — Thu, 08 Jan 2009 06:24:52 GMT

Hi siquser,
me also facing the same problem. i installed open office 3.0 on top of alfresco but still it is not searching the content of
ma-office 2007 documents.

did u resolve it?

if, plz provide the details…

thanks in advance

Re: How does Alfresco's content indexing work?

siquser — Thu, 08 Jan 2009 06:36:46 GMT

I remember having a conversation with Alfresco Engineer (on personal email thread), per him its a KNOWN BUG, hopefully Alfresco Team will resolve this issue ASAP
Only solution that I can think of is, convert the dcoument to Office 2003 servsion, upload it, then SEARCH should work

Re: How does Alfresco's content indexing work?

syed_imtiaz — Thu, 08 Jan 2009 09:40:40 GMT

You are right. Office 2007 files need to be saved as (word/excel/powerpoint)97-2003 format. Then search is instantenous.

Regards

Re: How does Alfresco's content indexing work?

benswitzer — Thu, 08 Jan 2009 13:16:09 GMT

The file types for OpenXML documents (MS Office 2007) and missing from alfresco/WEB-INF/classes/alfresco/mimetype/openoffice-document-formats.xml.

You obviously need a version of OpenOffice that supports OpenXML documents (version 3.0.0 does)

If I were you, I'd search if this issue has already been reported at http://issues.alfresco.com and otherwise file the bug.

:roll: :idea: :idea: :evil:

Re: How does Alfresco's content indexing work?

t_broyer — Thu, 08 Jan 2009 13:22:35 GMT

1. We have OpenOffice 3.0 installed on the server where Alfresco installed and I had mentioned about the same back on 16 Dec 2008 (please refer forum thread above)

Did you add the docx/xlsx/pptx in openoffice-document-formats.xml where, as I said, they are missing? (implying that having OpenOffice 3.0 is just *part* of the solution)

That being said, I do not have an MSOffice 2007 to test with, so I can just guess.

Re: How does Alfresco's content indexing work?

javauser007 — Mon, 12 Jan 2009 13:25:38 GMT

Hi broyer,
I have added all the configurations related to ms-office 2007 in openoffice-document-formats.xml
But still facing the same problem (I already installed openoffice 3.0 on top of alfresco 2.9B).

the following is a snipet of code which i added in openoffice-document-formats.xml

<document-format><name>Microsoft Word 2007</name>
<family>Text</family>
<mime-type>application/vnd.openxmlformats-officedocument.wordprocessingml.document</mime-type>
<file-extension>docx</file-extension>
<export-filters>
<entry><family>Text</family><string>MS Word 2007</string></entry>
</export-filters>
</document-format>

Any help is appriciated…

thanks..

Re: How does Alfresco's content indexing work?

javauser007 — Wed, 21 Jan 2009 07:19:28 GMT

can anybody solve this problem?

Re: How does Alfresco's content indexing work?

mikeh — Wed, 21 Jan 2009 08:48:54 GMT

In content-services-context.xml try adding this supportedMimetypes config to the extracter.OpenOffice bean:

<bean id="extracter.OpenOffice"    class="org.alfresco.repo.content.metadata.OpenOfficeMetadataExtracter"    parent="baseMetadataExtracter" >
   <property name="connection">
      <ref bean="openOfficeConnection" />
   </property>
   <property name="supportedMimetypes">
   <list>
        <value>application/msword</value>
      <value>application/vnd.excel</value>
      <value>application/vnd.powerpoint</value>
      <value>application/vnd.openxmlformats-officedocument.wordprocessingml.document</value>
      <value>application/vnd.openxmlformats-officedocument.spreadsheetml.sheet</value>
      <value>application/vnd.openxmlformats-officedocument.presentationml.presentation</value>
</list>
   </property>
</bean>‍‍‍‍‍‍‍‍‍‍‍‍‍‍‍

Mike

Re: How does Alfresco's content indexing work?

t_broyer — Wed, 21 Jan 2009 08:52:31 GMT

Hi broyer,
I have added all the configurations related to ms-office 2007 in openoffice-document-formats.xml
But still facing the same problem (I already installed openoffice 3.0 on top of alfresco 2.9B).

Er, Alfresco 2.9B… Are the docx/xslx/pptx entries present in alfresco/WEB-INF/classes/alfresco/mimetype/mimetype-map-openoffice.xml?

Re: How does Alfresco's content indexing work?

javauser007 — Thu, 22 Jan 2009 05:14:57 GMT

Hi broyer,
docx/xslx/pptx entries were not present in 2.9B, and also not in Enterprise 3.0 (mimetype-map-openoffice.xml).
Then how to make alfresco to read docx files…?

thanks..