Ask Doctor Search: No Search Activity in FAST's Search Business Center

One of the exciting features of FAST ESP 5.0 is the new interface intended for the business user, the Search Business Center. This new UI allows business users to view reports and make changes to layout and vocabulary items without needing to pester the IT department. The reporting subsystem is very useful. It shows search activity in both report and graph form, including popular searches and searches that returned no results.

But Dr. Search had a problem... it wasn't working! The good doctor even tried upgrading to the latest version, ESP 5.0.7, and still no luck.

So Dr. Search consulted a specialist, who we'll refer to as FASTcode, who politely pointed out that the good doctor hadn't read some of the documentation - oh my!

FASTcode suggested the two following steps, which did indeed fix the problem.

Step 1: Update the esp4j.properties with the new admin password.

This was only necessary because Dr. Search had added a password to the FAST "admin" account, a practice Dr. Search thinks everybody should do; by default FAST ESP has NO PASSWORD for the admin account.

The properties file needs to be updated in order to let the LogTransformer and other command line tools know about the new password.

Specific steps:

	Find the file: $FASTSEARCH/etc/esp4j.properties
	then find the line: esp.adminerver.password=
	(^^^ approx line 24)
	Add in your new password.
	Also stop and restart processes:
		Log Server
		Log Transformer
	For each process:
	in the Spider Admin UI
	System Management tab
	find the process and click Pause button [||],
	then let it stop,
	then click the Run button [>]
	

Step 2: Add annotation_class=user to the search parameters

By default the system does not include searches in the search reports. A specific CGI parameter needs to be added to override this, to tell the logging system "yes, do go ahead and log this particular search".

The good news is that this parameter can be automatically added to every search by setting it in the search profile, so there no "HTML coding" is needed. This needs to be done for all search profiles that are to have their searches logged (or passed in from your own search form as a hidden field).

Specific steps:

	Start in the Search Business Center UI
	find your search profile
	"Search Profile Settings"
	"Query Handling"
	"Input Defaults"
	"Advanced Options"
	edit button
	Find the "Static Query Parameters" box
	add "annotation_class=user"
	click save.
	(then eventually publish, for the change to become visible)
	

Dr. Search and FASTcode both think this ought to be the default someday, but for now this fixes it. Dr. Search will certainly mention it to them during the next consultation.

You can now do some new searches and verify that they eventually get into the reports. But keep in mind that there will be some delay before your test searches show up. Search statistics are only pulled over from the log files periodically, say once an hour, so it will take some time for new searches to start showing up. But be patient, this should fix the problem.

We hope this has been useful to you; feel free to contact Dr. Search directly if you have any follow-up or additional questions. Remember to send your enterprise search questions to Dr. Search. Every entry (with name and address) gets a free cup and a pen, and the thanks of Dr. Search and his readers.