Enhanced global search

This extension replace the standard global search with a faster and more accurate search.

• Users can improve results accuracy by specifying required, optional and denied words.
• Administrator can fine-tune the results relevance, by changing configuration parameters.
• It uses MySQL fulltext feature to perform the global search.

• This extension relies on MySQL full-text feature.
• It uses the main database configured for iTop.

• MySQL 5.6 or above
• Mariadb 10.0.5 or above
• iTop 2.5.0 or above

Use the Standard installation process for this extension.

array(
  'Organization' => 2.0,
  'Person' => 1.5,
  'Location' => 1.2,
  'SLT' => 0.8,
)

configuration example 1

'combodo-fulltext-search' => array(
    'object_weight_factor' => array(
        'Organization' => 2.0,
        'Person' => 1.5,
        'Location' => 1.2,
        'SLT' => 0.8,
    ),
    'excluded_classes' => array(
       'Attachment',
    ),
),

configuration example 2

'combodo-fulltext-search' => array (
   'object_weight_factor' => array (
      'Organization' => 2.0,
      'Person' => 5.0,
      'Location' => 1.2,
      'SLT' => 0.8,
   ),
   'sentence_weight_factor' => 10.0,
   'mandatory_weight_factor' => 2.0,
   'start_with_weight_factor' => 0.5,
 
   // Max delay to re-index in realtime, 
   // above this it flags index entries as out of date,
   // they will be computed by the background task
   'max_interactive_index_update_time_in_sec' => 5,
   // Background task periodicity, should be more than iTop cron periodicity 
   'background_index_refresh_period_in_min' => 5,
   // Background task max time per run
   'background_max_indexation_time_in_min' => 1,  
 
   // identical to run refresh-search-index.cli.php in a system cron, 
   // useful if you don't have system access
   'background_index_full_rebuild_enabled' => false, // deactivated by default
   'background_index_full_rebuild_time' => '11:00',
   'background_index_full_rebuild_week_days' => 'wednesday',
 ),

Create, update or delete object

When ever a user create, update or delete an object in iTop, the extension will recompute the fulltext search indexes. If it cannot do it within max_interactive_index_update_time_in_sec second, it flags out-of-date indexes and they will be processed by the itop-cron using a background task.

You may see that warning message when you change an organization name for example, as it is present in most iTop objects, so a lot of indexes will have to be updated, more than what can be processed in a user acceptable delay

Searching for one word When searching for a single word (example: demo) the following searches are done:

1. The word: demo
2. The words starting with the search: demo*

Searching for multiple words

When searching for multiple words, (example: user-level lock) the following searches are done:

1. The exact sentence entered: “user_level lock”
2. All the words are present: +user_level +lock
3. At least one word is present: user_level lock

As - is a keyword to exclude a word, it is replaced by _ which is another keyword to represent any single character.

Computing weight

Each search is bringing points calculated by MySQL fulltext search, which are then weighted with the configuration parameters set.

To ensure that the search will be efficient within your iTop, there are additional actions for Administrator users:

• Global search management action which allow to rebuild the indexes after a change of configuration parameter: object_weight_factor.
• Debug action which display details on how the result ordering is generated, based on weight.

• user_level lock has a MySQL provided weight
• “user_level lock” has the above weight * sentence_weight_factor
• Total Score is the sum of the various scores * object_weight_factor

There is an administrator menu, which allow to

• see on-going status of re-indexation processing
• run re-indexation tasks for those who do not have access to their iTop system (Use with caution!!!)

Read carefully the text near the checkbox, it is refreshed based on the check status.

1. First checkbox delete all indexes.
2. Second checkbox alone is similar to using the /script/refresh-search-index.cli.php on your iTop system
3. Third checkbox, will request the cron to do the work in background, rather than doing it real-time interactively. Background computation is performed every background_index_refresh_period_in_min minutes for a maximum duration of background_max_indexation_time_in_min minutes before stopping until the next run.

Consequences of your choices:

• Checking the first one, without the second one, leads to no more index at all
• Checking the first and second without the third one, leads to timeout.
• Checking the 3 may work, but it's much better to use the /script/populate-search-index.cli.php on your server. It will be faster and more efficient than truncating the tasks in multiple small pieces of work.
• Interactive in most cases will timeout and fail (apart from empty test databases).

A better alternative to using this administrative page within iTop, is to run in CLI the below scripts:

1. It puts your iTop under maintenance
2. Drop the index table
3. Reopen access to your iTop (also global search will not respond)
4. Rebuild the fulltext index table

To prevent situation where the script and the cron would both try to recompute indexes at the same time, we have used a MySQL lock.

Some distribution, overwrite the default MySQL/MariaDB value for the wait_timeout parameter and put 600 (seconds). That delay is not enough to populate indexes for a big database, as a result, the script will return “MySQL has gone away” which is the answer to the unlock request done by the script when it finishes. In reality, the work was done, indexes have been recomputed, the error is misleading, it's just the lock which could not be released, because after wait_timeout seconds of inactivity on that session, MySQL/MariaDB has decided it was useless to wait more, and released the lock.
⇒ To get rid of that error, just restore default value for wait_timeout (28 800).

• It does not put iTop under maintenance
• It takes every existing index, and re-index them one by one
• Missing index are not created. So the script is not adequate for an existing database on which you just installed the extension.
• It is useful to remove entries corresponding to recently archived objects

Just type the words in the global search field, then enter or click on the magnifier icon to get the result :

By default the search searchs on all Classes with category searchable, including abstract classes, such as Ticket, Contact or FunctionalCI.

Restrict previous search to a single class	Expend back to all classes

FunctionalCI:combodo

The class name can be the internal name (like FunctionalCI) of the display name in the current language used (like CI fonctionnel).

A menu allow to display some of the fields which have matched the requested pattern

On each returned object, you can request related objects: