From TeamWeaverWiki
This short guide describes how to write crawlers to make additional data sources available for searching with TeamWeaver Integrated Search.
A list of existing crawlers can be found at: supported data sources resp. repo_config.xml.
There are two general strategies for crawling data sources with TeamWeaverIS:
- "Pull"-Crawlers are included in TeamWeaverIS and allow to crawl/extract data by accessing external sources/system. Pull-crawlers are fairly easy to realize, but have the disadvantage, that the index might not be accurate, since TeamWeaverIS does only learn about data changes, when a crawl is executed.
- "Push"-Crawlers are implemented on the side of the client system which includes the data. They proactively update the index and thus have a direct connection to the TeamWeaverIS backend. Accordingly, push-crawlers are more difficult to implement, but can reflect changes in the data more rapidly in the index.
Writing a "Pull"-Crawler
At the basic level, creating a pull-crawler requires to implement two Java classes and changing two XML-files - a Crawler and a Processor each. Crawlers are classes which access a data source and extract/create single data items. Processors act upon these items to prepare them for feeding into the index.
Crawler
- You need to create a subclass of CrawlerBase which basically means to implement a method
crawlObject. See our JIRACrawler for an example.
- Afterwards, register your new crawler in defaultCrawlers.xml. You need to define a unique
<repoType> key, which corresponds to the <srcType> in repo_config.xml.
Processor
Advanced topics
- tbd. (generic JDBC crawler, Plain index vs. metadata)
Writing a "Push"-Crawler
- tbd.
- Push-Crawlers have to call the TeamWeaver backend's IndexService
- You might want to look at our Woogle code for an example implementation of a push-crawler