Overview: Full-Text Search in OnBase

Want an overview of full-text search in OnBase and how it works in your environment? The demo video below and this blog will provide exactly that!

Overview: Full-Text Search

What is Full Text Search?

Full-text search allows users to perform searches on collections of documents that have been indexed with full text using input words or phrases as their search terms. Users could also use simple query syntax to construct search strings with operators such as AND and OR.

Full-text searches can also be combined with keyword or date ranges to filter the documents returned. It makes use of the Hyland Full Text Server to perform these advanced searches and is integrated within all of the OnBase clients, making search and retrieval significantly faster from wherever your users work rather than performing an external text search.

What is Required to Make Full-Text Work?

To begin licensing, the full text search license is required to be able to implement full text within your environment. If you’re interested in obtaining a quote for this license, please reach out to your account manager.

For installation, you must install both the Hyland Full Text Server and the Hyland OCR engine in order to full text index your documents.

As part of that indexing process, it is also important to create a folder location where the full text catalogs will be stored. The rest of the setup for full text will occur within configuration, so let’s go back there to see more.

Within configuration, we must assign user groups with the rights to access the full text configuration window and to allow access to full text within the clients.

Beginning with access to the Full Text configuration page, this can be begun by navigating to Users, User Groups and Rights, select your User Group, and then select Configuration Rights.

Then here, you’ll go to the products tab, and ensure that the full text search configuration checkbox is checked. Then select save. Additionally, to give permission to users to use full text within the client, on this page we’ll select privileges and ensure that full text search under client based products is checked. And then select Save again.

With those rights assigned, let’s first take a look at the full text configuration. Under Utils and Full Text Search, we can bring up the Full Text Configuration module window. This page allows us to review the setup of full text within the environment. So let’s examine these tabs:

• They can name the first one, Server. Server shows the status of the server that is hosting Full Text Search. You can see the green check mark that only the server is online with a recent last heartbeat. If you ever need to shut down a server, you can do so by checking the shutdown box.
• Our next tab is catalogs. Catalogs are essential to full text as they hold all of the index information for each of the document types. If I expand this Catalog path, you can see that each document type gets its own catalog. This is done to increase the overall performance of the system by sectioning at the data. Speaking of document types, this page allows you to decide what document types you would like to have indexed for full text by checking the Active switch, that will enable a document type to be indexed once you add your catalog path. It is important to note that you do not need to fill in more than the top folder as Full Text can automatically create the subfolders for each catalog once you hit Save. So let’s go ahead and configure full text now for our AP checks document type. It’s also important to know that when making changes, you will need to restart the Full Text Service and application server to have these changes take effect.
• Next is the Process tab. It allows you to process any existing documents to be indexed, referred to as the .bac file. Once catalogs are created, indexing automatically occurs day forward for the catalog, but the existing documents will not be available for searches. That is where the Process tab comes into play. Selecting the document types you would like to index, and even being able to apply a date range to that, you can then hit begin processing to add these documents to Full Text Search.
• Now that we’ve processed some documents and we go to the status tab, you can find the document statuses to see the number of documents that are pending, in progress, failed, and completed. Refreshing our data, we can see our AP checks docu type is now in pending, soon to be indexed. This “day forward” section is for the documents that come in after the catalog has been set up automatically being indexed while our back file section consists of the doc types that have been manually processed that were already within the system before full text was configured for their doc type. Additionally, down here you will find the catalog statistics. This gives a nice overview of the amount of documents for each doctype that have been full texted.
• Next is the Thesaurus tab. As its name implies, this tab is used to configure and maintain the thesaurus used by Full Text Search, allowing your searches to return results for related terms. For example, by enabling the custom thesaurus, we can add the term car and allow it to bring results back for similar words like truck, automobile, and vehicle. As they are all synonyms of our main term.
• Now lastly is the maintenance tab. This gives users the ability to clean up obsolete data and defragment the index of data within their catalogs which can help improve system performance. In order to clean the data, check the clean checkbox and select save in order to allow it to clean the full text catalogs.

With the setup and configuration out of the way, let’s see what it looks like in action. As a reminder, full text works in all clients, however, we will be using Unity for this demonstration.

Full-text is best suited for situations where keyword information doesn’t necessarily reveal the whole picture.

If you log in to your client, we can go to document retrieval and then navigate to your document type you would like to retrieve. Now where you may type in your keywords, there will also be an available full text search area below that. We can use this field to search for a key term we wanna find.

In this scenario in this video, were looking at some of our contract documents, and we knew that while the keywords here designate customer and date, they don’t show much more about the contents of the actual contract.

If our users need to see information on the various clauses and agreements we had signed for, we’d use one of those as our search term to see what that part of the contract includes. In this case, we know we have a customer vendor agreement signed, so we used vendor services as our key term, and then we can hit find. And this brought up the results of our full text search.

You can see in the video that the results look different from our normal retrieval. We had a score on the left to show us, what degree the full text was able to match our term. And then we have the name of the document, the file type, and a summary of where it identified that full text search term from. Double clicking the document, and this will bring up a highlighted text window to show you exactly where it found our search terms from.

Using the bottom selection bar, we can see where all those relevant uses are and identify those full text search terms and where they appear within our document.

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