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This brief guide describes the basic steps for creating your first search index.
First of all you need to create an index. An index can be created in memory or on disk. An index created in memory cannot be saved after exiting your program. In contrast, an index created on disk may be loaded in the future to continue working. Details on creating an index are described in the section Creating an index. The following example shows how to create an index on disk.
const indexFolder = 'c:/MyIndex/'; // Specify the path to the index folder
const index = new groupdocs.search.Index(indexFolder);
To continue working with a previously created index, it must be loaded. Each constructor of the Index class by default loads the index, if it exists at the specified path. And only an explicit indication causes an index to be overwritten. The following example shows how to load an existing index.
const indexFolder = 'c:/MyIndex/'; // Specify the path to the index folder
const index = new groupdocs.search.Index(indexFolder);
After creating an index, you need to add documents to the index for indexing. Indexing documents can be successful or unsuccessful for various reasons, for example, due to read errors from the disk or the presence of a password to access a document. To receive information about indexing errors, you can subscribe to the ErrorOccurred event. To work with events, see the section Search index events. The following example shows how to subscribe to the ErrorOccurred event.
const eventHandler = java.newProxy('com.groupdocs.search.events.EventHandler', {
invoke: function (sender, args) {
console.log(args.getMessage()); // Writing error messages to the console
},
});
index.getEvents().ErrorOccurred.add(eventHandler);
Document indexing can be performed synchronously or asynchronously. Synchronous indexing means that a thread that started the indexing process will be busy until the operation is completed. The following example shows how to perform indexing synchronously.
const indexFolder = 'c:/MyIndex/'; // Specify path to the index folder
const documentsFolder = 'c:/MyDocuments/'; // Specify the path to a folder containing documents to search
const index = new groupdocs.search.Index(indexFolder); // Creating an index in the specified folder
index.add(documentsFolder); // Synchronous indexing documents from the specified folder
More often, however, it is necessary to perform indexing asynchronously, with the ability to execute other tasks in the thread that launched the operation. A detailed description of all aspects of the indexing process is provided in the section Indexing. The following example shows how to perform indexing asynchronously.
const indexFolder = 'c:/MyIndex/'; // Specify path to the index folder
const documentsFolder = 'c:/MyDocuments/'; // Specify the path to a folder containing documents to search
// Creating an index
const index = new groupdocs.search.Index(indexFolder);
// Subscribing to the event
const statusChangedHandler = java.newProxy('com.groupdocs.search.events.EventHandler', {
invoke: function (sender, args) {
console.log('Status changed: ' + args.getStatus());
if (
String(args.getStatus()) == String(groupdocs.search.IndexStatus.Ready) ||
String(args.getStatus()) == String(groupdocs.search.IndexStatus.Failed)
) {
// There should be a code indicating the completion of the operation
console.log('Indexing completed.');
}
},
});
index.getEvents().StatusChanged.add(statusChangedHandler);
// Setting the flag for asynchronous indexing
const options = new groupdocs.search.IndexingOptions();
options.setAsync(true);
// Asynchronous indexing documents from the specified folder
// The current method terminates before the operation completes
index.add(documentsFolder, options);
When documents are indexed, the index is ready to handle search queries. The following types of search queries are supported: simple, fuzzy, case sensitive, boolean, phrasal, faceted, with wildcards, and others. Description of search queries of various types is presented in the section Searching. The example below shows how to perform simple search in an index.
const query = 'Einstein'; // Specify a search query
const result = index.search(query); // Searching in the index
When a search is completed, you need to somehow interpret a result. The result can be represented by a simple list of documents found, or the words and phrases found can be highlighted in the text of the document. For more information on processing search results, see Search results. The example below shows how to list found documents in the console.
// Search in the index
const result = index.search(query);
// Printing the result
console.log('Documents found: ' + result.getDocumentCount());
console.log('Total occurrences found: ' + result.getOccurrenceCount());
for (let i = 0; i < result.getDocumentCount(); i++) {
const document = result.getFoundDocument(i);
console.log('\tDocument: ' + document.getDocumentInfo().getFilePath());
console.log('\tOccurrences: ' + document.getOccurrenceCount());
}
The following example shows how to highlight search results in the text of a document. Detailed information on how to highlight search results is described in the section Highlighting search results.
const result = index.search(query); // Search in the index
if (result.getDocumentCount() > 0) {
const document = result.getFoundDocument(0); // Getting the first found document
const filePath = Utils.OutputPath + 'BasicUsage/Highlighted.html';
const outputAdapter = new groupdocs.search.FileOutputAdapter(groupdocs.search.OutputFormat.Html, filePath); // Creating the output adapter to a file
const highlighter = new groupdocs.search.DocumentHighlighter(outputAdapter); // Creating the highlighter object
index.highlight(document, highlighter); // Generating output HTML formatted document with highlighted search results
}
To learn more about search features and get familiar how to enhance your search solution, please refer to the advanced usage section.
You may easily run the code from documentation articles and see the features in action in our GitHub examples:
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