Alfresco and Custom Indexing Engine

[jjacobwip]

Hi,

We are doing some high level analysis to integrate Alfresco with a custom indexing engine. We want to push the documents to the custom indexing engine and get it indexed there.

Any thoughts on how this can be implemented? Since Alfresco plugged in Solr with 4.0 and has the ability to switch b/w Solr and Lucen, we are hoping that the architecture already can support a custom indexing engine.

Any ideas, directions is highly appreciated

Thanks,
Jerry

[kaynezhang]

In Alfresco  search is implemented using subsystem, a subsystem is a configurable module responsible for a sub-part of Alfresco functionality.
So technically  we can extend alfresco search sub-system and add our own implementation,Now alfresco search sub-system include 3 implementations:
noindex:classpath*:alfresco/extension/subsystems/Search/noindex/noindex/*-context.xml
solr:classpath*:alfresco/extension/subsystems/Search/solr/solr/*-context.xml
lucene:classpath*:alfresco/extension/subsystems/Search/lucene/lucene/*-context.xml

[jjacobwip]

Thanks. I did notice the Search susbsystems. Will take a deeper look at it.

[zaizi]

If you are looking to completely replace Lucene or Solr, I would strongly recommend you to reconsider. Alfresco is tightly integrated with both and they are used to provide more than just full text search services to Alfresco.

My suggestion is to leave those subsystems in-place and create your own system that can index content from Alfresco. Then customise Alfresco's user interface to use your custom index solution where appropriate.

My experience is from our work integrating Solr4, Elastic Search and Amazon Cloud Search with Alfresco. You can see the details here: http://www.zaizi.com/blog/the-next-search-generation-in-alfresco-is-here

[kaynezhang]

Agree,If you just want to build an (integrated) data retrieval system you can just grab data from alfresco using api and push the documents to the your indexing engine.Then implement custom search interface with your indexing engine.