Thunderstone Support Forums

I have a standard walk setup with custom data fields "Company", "Location"...in the xml file. When I go to do a Meta Search on this standard search these fields are not returned with the rest of the xml. How do I make sure these custom fields are accessible in the meta search?

The settings page for Meta Search profiles currently does not allow for specifying which additional fields should be output, and what their names are. We'll need to create a patch for that.

Definitely looking forward to that patch. In the meantime can you think of anyways I might be able to access this data from the meta search? Is there a way I can store it in one of the designated fields and then extract it in the meta search into its own field...

I don't know if you can think of anything please get back to me. If not I'll wait for the patch. Thanks for your help!

The following is a bit of an ugly hack, so marked private.

If you create a file in the format of the appliance settings you can push the settings onto the appliance.

You'll want something like:

<Applianceoptions>
<applianceoption>
<Name>SSc_addfielddisp</Name>
<Profile>PROFILENAME</Profile>
<Value>Y
Y
Y
</Value>
</applianceoption>
<applianceoption>
<Name>SSc_addfieldsort</Name>
<Profile>PROFILENAME</Profile>
<Value>N
N
N
</Value>
</applianceoption>
<applianceoption>
<Name>SSc_addfieldquery</Name>
<Profile>PROFILENAME</Profile>
<Value>N
N
N
</Value>
</applianceoption>
<applianceoption>
<Name>SSc_addfieldname</Name>
<Profile>PROFILENAME</Profile>
<Value>Company
Location
...
</Value>
</applianceoption>
<applianceoption>
<Name>SSc_addfieldtype</Name>
<Profile>PROFILENAME</Profile>
<Value>t
t
t
</Value>
</applianceoption>
</Applianceoptions>

Replace PROFILENAME with the profile, and the names with the names you want in the XML, save it to a file and then restore settings. Restore settings will leave unmentioned settings alone.

I see now that Additional Fields boxes are shown in the crawl definition of Meta Searches (obviously updated from 1 year ago). However, they apparently do not work -

I have a Meta Search with 2 sub-profiles - one has the additional fields defined while the other does not. The Meta Search has the same Additional Fields defined as the sub-profile that does. However, no additional fields are exported in the results (and yes, both are set to be searchable, sortable, and exported). Ideas?

bump...

When you say "no additional fields are exported in the results", I'm assuming you're talking about the XML output, correct?

That situation shouldn't be a problem, and I'm not able to duplicate the problem here. The results from the profile that doesn't have the additional field will simply have empty elements.

Are the additional fields included in the XML output of the sub-profile that contains the field?

Yes - XML Output
Yes - the fields are output in the XML output of the sub-profile that contains the field

Well... We've discovered something but not sure what yet... We're looking into it...

Try creating a new meta search profile and see if the problem persists in the new profile.

We found the cause - a metasearch profile that was created before scripts with Additional Fields in place will not properly output additional fields, despite having the settings for them present in its All Walk Settings.

Delete & re-create the metasearch profile, and it should be good.