ORACLE Secure Enterprise Search and Content DB / Content Services

Question

OSES provides a connector to index and search ContentDB / Content Services.
I could not find any information which content will be indexed and searchable.
a) Fulltext (e.g. PDF / Doc)
b) Standard Attributes (e.g. description)
c) Custom Attributes
Can indexing (a+b+c) be configured,
or do I need to customize the connector to let the description field be indexed
or do I need to re-implement the connector?
kind regards, tom.

Answer 1

It can be done but it's not easy.
Federation is done through the Web Services API. To create a custom federation to a non-SES endpoint, you have to replicate most of the Web Services API. You can choose to do it selectively, for example you can choose to implement doOracleSearch but not doOracleAdvancedSearch or doOracleBrowseSearch (names from memory - could be wrong) which would give you the basic search capability but no advanced search or browse against the federated source.
Then you've got the problem of merging results. When all federated sources are SES based, it's easy to merge them. You know that a document which scores 63 fron one source is more accurate than one that scores 62 from another, and so should appear higher in the hitlist. But if one of those sources is - say - Bling, then how do you that 63 as a score from Bling is comparable to 63 as a score from SES? They're probably not comparable.
These are the reasons that mention of federation to external sources was removed from the 10.1.8.4 documentation, it was felt that it just wasn't practical for most users.
A rather better alternative is to use the Suggested Content feature. This is MUCH easier to configure, and doesn't attempt to merge the results. From a user's point of view this may be less desirable than a merged result set, but given that any such merge probably won't work well, it's really better all round.