Monday, February 13, 2012

Endeca | Programmer primer | Objects Query\Results\Connection

A lot of customers use Endeca or SOLR as their search engine in WCS world and this primer series on Endeca is to provide some basics:

Information Transformation Layer: Transforms the source data into indices for MDEX Engine. The transformation process does not change the original data but only it's representation within your Endeca Impl.

Query (Object ENEQuery or sub class UrlENEQuery): Endeca follows one query one page approach. The MDEX is designed to return all of the information required to build an entire page.The MDEX engine is specifically designed this way to reduce the number of queries. There are four kinds of queries:

  • Navigation (N) --setNavDescriptors(),
  • Endeca Record (R)- setERecSpec(), 
  • Dimension Search(D) --setDimSearchTerms(),
  • Aggregate Endeca Record (A, An, Au)--setAggrERecSpec.

e.g. ENEQuery nequery = new UrlENEQuery(request.getQueryString(), “UTF-8”);
     ENEQuery nequery = new ENEQuery();
    DimValIdList descriptors = new DimValIdList("123");
   nequery.setNavDescriptors(descriptors);


Query Search results as EnQueryResults object: For any given type of query such as navigation, record search, dimension search, .etc. The top level object returned is EnQueryResults and that could encapsulate other objects.

Endeca Record Object as ERec Object: It contains all the information regarding the Endeca record including Endeca Properties (name\value pairs) and Information about record's location within the dimension hierarchy.

Connectivity object HttpENEConnection: enables connections with MDEX engine.
     e.g. ENEConnection nec = new HttpENEConnection(eneHost, enePort);


Query Exceptions : There are multiple exceptions ENException, ENEConnectionException objects.


Sample code for retrieval of query results:

//Create an ENEConnection
ENEConnection nec = new HttpENEConnection(eneHost, enePort);
//Create a query from the browser request query string
ENEQuery nequery = new UrlENEQuery(request.getQueryString(),
“UTF-8”);
//Execute the MDEX Engine query
ENEQueryResults results = nec.query(nequery);

1 comment:

  1. Do you have any experience with the Endeca SEO URL Optimization module? If so, what is the best way to implement that and rewrite the URL's that come back from your search command?

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