Full-text search and indexing

With the full-text search capability introduced in Vertec 6.8, you can now search the emails (incl. attachments) and documents stored in Vertec, as well as the texts.

When the full-text search is started for the first time, a general indexing has to be performed so that the existing data can be searched and found. This is automatically triggered by the Vertec Cloud Server as soon as it starts after the installation of version 6.8. Therefore, the full-text search and the indexing of changes in the Vertec Cloud App and the Vertec Web App run automatically without any additional settings, both in the Cloud Suite and On-Premises.

When operating On-Premises, you must make additional configurations in the following scenarios:

• If you have multiple Vertec Cloud Servers in operation, you can find the correct parameterization of the individual instances in the article Multiple Cloud Server instances.
• If you still occasionally use the Vertec Desktop App, you must configure the full-text search as described in Using full-text search with On-Premises. Otherwise, you risk incomplete or incorrect search results because Desktop App changes are not automatically indexed, but rather only after complete re-indexation.

The full text search works as follows:

• An Index field configuration controls which texts are searched in Vertec. Vertec provides a default, which you can be easily change and expand.
• In the system settings for full-text search, you can switch on and off the search through emails (incl. attachments) and documents (Word/PDF), provided that the emails and documents are saved in Vertec (System settings > General > Document storage  Internal).
• All the texts and documents to be searched are indexed and stored in an index. The search mechanism then accesses this information and can thus deliver the desired results very efficiently.
• When creating, modifying or deleting data in Vertec that is relevant for the search due to the index configura-tion, the indexing/re-indexing of the relevant object is performed automatically or, in the case of deleting, auto-matically removed from the index
• It may happen that automatic indexing does not work as intended (for example, because someone deletes an object within the same Notif interval and someone else makes changes to the same object). Therefore, a scheduled task in Vertec performs a full re-indexing once a week to clean up the index.
• Indexing can also be initiated by Vertec administrators at any time using Python. You can find a description of the available methods in Vertec Python functions.

Scheduled task for full indexing

There is a scheduled task called Refresh index for full-text search. It runs by default every Saturday night and thus cleans the full-text search index every week.

You can also carry out the scheduled task manually by right-clicking > Execute now. However, this must be done with caution, as the entire index will be re-created and the search will be limited during this time.    

Single objects, object lists or objects by class can also be re-indexed using the Python functions vtcapp.indexlist() and vtcapp.indexclass(), or via vtcapp.indexactivities() for documents and emails.

Full-text search user rights

If the user who starts a full-text search does not have read permission on certain objects or fields of the index field configuration, the corresponding entries are filtered out of the results list and do not appear in the search results.

For documents and emails (the indexing is set in the system settings), the following rights apply:

• Word/PDF Documents: On the activity, the read permission for content is checked for the document content, and documentFullName is checked for the document names.
• Subject, body and attachments (Word/PDF) of emails: On the activity, the read permission is checked for content. Please note that the email text is also found in the text field of the activity, which is present by default in the index configuration. In this case, the email text is still found and the activity is shown as a result.