Lablz continues with its strategic direction of making Search a center of user experience in any Lablz App. Many changes
were pushed to current 3.4 build, others will show up in 4.0.
New Search features
We have added spell checking (language independent), word stemming (English only for now), autocomplete in Mobile mode (soon will show up in desktop mode as well), and word pairs for autocomplete (shingles in Lucene-speak). A day ago we enhanced each autocomplete word with icons of related classes. We continue to optimize the Search (just shaved 200ms by reader caching) and improving the presentation layer. We are also fine tuning Filter after Search so that novice users have a way to drill down after a simple text search.
Automatic reindexing upon upgrades
This rapid rate of changes has created a problem. Quite often new Search features require changes in the index structure and this breaks Search on all developer, test and production machines until full re-indexing is done on every virtual host. This was a manual process until yesterday. Now Search index incorporates a version number and at the server startup the job
index resources
will automatically reindex those hosts which have an old index structure. Keep in mind that this job may take a long time on hosts with lots of data. We will make changes in UI so that when user attempts to Search the host which is being reindexed a nice message will be issued. It is worth mentioning here another indexing job
index for autocomplete
which recreates additional indexes used by autocomplete. Unlike all other Searches which usually pick up newly entered/modified data in about 10 seconds after submission, autocomplete needs a long time to digest all changes and thus it is done today only once a day.
Forcing reindexing
Sometimes it is necessary to force reindexing of the specific host. It is only required if something broke down in otherwise fully automated indexing process. Hopefully you will never need it, but if you do then look for a file named
indexVersion
in tmp dir under each host. Deleting this file will force re-indexing of this particular host at the next server restart.