Skip to main content

ATG Search architectural flow : Search and Index



I would like to explain the high level ATG Search implementation architecture ( for an online store) through the above diagram. In this diagram 1.x denotes the search functionality and 2.x denotes the indexing functionality. I have given JBoss as the application server.

Physical Boxes and Application Servers in the diagram ( as recommended by ATG )  :
  1. Estore ( Commerce ) Box --> The box with the estore/site ear (with the site JSPs and Java codes).
  2. Search Engine Box --> The box with the search engine application running.
  3. Indexing Engine Box --> The box with the indexing engine application running.
  4. CA (Content Administration) Box --> The box with the ATG CA ear ( where we could take CA -BCC - Search Administration and configure the search projects) .
  5. Search Indexer Box --> The box with the ATG Search Index ear ( to fetch the index data from repository). Note that the engine performing indexing will need access to the data it is indexing, which for production is the production repository. It will typically access the data via a commerce instance.  For best performance, and for large repositories, that commerce instance should be dedicated for search indexing, and should be a fast machine.
1. Search functionality flow details :

     1.1   Estore server will find the search engine box's host and search engine application running port details from the Search repository
     1.2   Estore server will call the Search engine application as a SOAP request using this host an port
     1.3   Search engine will find the search results using the index file
     1.4   Search engine will send the search results back to the Estore server

2. Index functionality flow details :

     2.1   CA server will start the indexing and will call the Search Index server to fetch the data to be indexed from the repository
     2.2   Search Index server will fetch the data from the catalog repository
     2.3   CA server will call the Index engine application to create the index files
     2.4   Index engine application will create the index files and keep it in a shared folder so that all the search engine applications can read it
     2.5   During the index deploy phase, all search engines will copy the index files to a local folder for fast access

If you need more details, please comment so that I can answer your specific questions  :-)


Labels:

Comments

  1. Anonymous18 January 2012 at 15:55

    nice article

    ReplyDelete
  2. Anonymous15 February 2012 at 06:14

    it is great and simple. Incase both Ca, index and search engine are on same host even then will it communicate via RMI?

    ReplyDelete
  3. Sony Thomas15 February 2012 at 12:26

    First of all, it is not recommended to have these 2 servers and search engine in the same host due to performance reasons. If we have them on the same box, communication with the search engine will always be through SOAP http request and from CA to search index will be via the remote port defined in search indexer.

    ReplyDelete
  4. Anonymous9 March 2012 at 01:49

    Does the engine query the latest deployed index for the results or does it query the index file that is mentioned as part of the search request?

    If it does the latter, how does the index information get updated on the client?

    ReplyDelete
  5. Sony Thomas9 March 2012 at 10:12

    The engine will look into the current deployed index. The current deployed index can be the latest index or can be an old one deployed through historical index deploy.

    Why the client need the index information ?

    ReplyDelete
  6. Anonymous26 July 2012 at 16:46

    All articles related to ATG are really interesting and easy to understand Thomas! Great work.

    ReplyDelete
  7. Anonymous29 May 2014 at 12:10

    Ur are really amazing SONY.... Iam New to ATG.. I want to know more concepts of ATG will u help me plzzz.....

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

ATG - more about Forms and Form Handlers

An ATG form is defined by the dsp:form tag, which typically encloses DSP tags that specify form elements, such as dsp:input that provide direct access to Nucleus component properties. Find below a sample dsp:form tag.    <dsp:form action="/testPages/showPersonProperties.jsp" method="post" target="_top">      <p>Name: <dsp:input bean="/samples/Person.name" type="text"/>      <p>Age: <dsp:input bean="/samples/Person.age" type="text" value="30"/>      <p><dsp:input type="submit" bean="/samples/Person.submit"/> value="Click to submit"/>    </dsp:form>   When the user submits the form, the /samples/Person.name property is set to the value entered in the input field.Unlike standard HTML, which requires the name attribute for most input tags; the name attribute is optional for DSP form element tags. If an input tag omits the n...
11 comments
Read more

ATG - basic concepts of ATG

This blog is for the ATG beginners to get some basic overview about ATG. I just given the ATG concepts as a list of numbered points for the ease of understanding. 1. At the framework level, ATG is a               java based application platform for hosting web-based applications, as well as RMI accessible business components,               with an ORM layer,               a component container,               an MVC framework,               and a set of tag libraries for JSP. 2. Art Technology Group(ATG)'s Dynamo Application Server (DAS) is a Java EE compliant application server. DAS is no longer actively developed as ATG recommends using other Java EE applications servers for its products such as BEA WebLogic, JBoss or IBM WebSphere. 3. Prior to ATG 2007, JHTML was used instead of JSP for view purpose. J...
4 comments
Read more

Good features of Eclipse3.5 (Eclipse Galileo) JDT

This blog will list down the new features of Eclipse Galileo JDT. I will write another blog regarding the features of Eclipse Helios and Eclipse Indigo. Read about Eclipse Helios features @  http://tips4ufromsony.blogspot.com/2011/11/good-features-of-eclipse-36-eclipse.html ========================================================== 1. Toggle Breadcrumb —> Will list the name of the file and the method name with respect to your cursor position , on the top of the Eclipse IDE. From here you can go to other methods, other classes in same package , …. Screen shot of Toggle Breadcrumb: ========================================================== 2. From the method call , you can either go to declaration or to implementation Screen shot of implementation call: ========================================================== 3. Advanced Open Type –> You can restrict the open type to a selected Working set only. Screen shot of Advanced Open Type: ==========...
2 comments
Read more

ATG and XML File Combination

              An XML file might appear at several points in the CONFIGPATH. The ATG platform, at runtime,   automatically combines all the XML files in the CONFIGPATH with the same name into a single composite file, which is then used by the appropriate component.               XML files are combined one tag at a time: in other words, tags are matched up, and the combination rules are applied to each pair of matched tags. XML file combination is controlled with an XML attribute named xml-combine. This attribute is used only in the preprocessing stage of XML file combination. The xml-combine attribute can have the following values: xml-combine = "replace" xml-combine = "remove" xml-combine = "append" xml-combine = "append-without-matching" -->  This is the same as  xml-combine="append" , except that embedded tags are not matched and combined recursively. The content is simply appended. ...
Post a Comment
Read more

Mozilla FireFox - how to add security certificate exception urls

If you visit a web site with a secure connection(https) and if the website's security certificate has some problem like the security certificate presented by the website was not issued by a trusted certificate authority  or  the security certificate has expired or is not yet valid, you will get an error page ( like below in IE ) with an option to continue to this website. When this non secure page is loading, in Internet Explorer, you will get an option to specify whether you need to download the page content files like JS, CSS, Images,... But you will not get such an option in FireFox/Chrome and could see only the text data in this new non secure page. If you are doing some local development with FireFox/Chrome and have such a situation, you might want to override this security restriction. FireFox provides some exception url list in secure certificates menu. Go to Options - Advanced - Encryption - View Certificates and click the exception list and...
Post a Comment
Read more