If you have migrated or moved an IBM Connections instance from 3.0.1 > 4.x (either 4.0 or 4.5) or moved data between 4.x servers you may have noticed a weird issue with searching, especially around communities.
The reason I have been a bit quiet on the blog of late is because I am working on a few Connections projects many of which have involved migrating data between test and live servers or replicating data between servers. I have come across a few issues relating to search so I thought I would share them to save you guys the pain.
Everyone knows when you migrate or move data between servers you should clear the scheduled tasks and rebuild the search indexes – but in V4.x a new set of search data came in for Community searching – the catalog.
When the search task runs is collects a bunch of information about communities for the lists you see under the my communities tab and public communities – it collects this in the catalog.
The issues I was seeing was that all historical data regarding Community membership and Public communities was not being shown and that is because of the catalog.
There are a couple of places that catalog data is stored and you can check this by looking up the WebSphere variables :
CATALOG_INDEX_DIR
CATALOG_REPLICATION_DIR
Typically CATALOG_INDEX_DIR is stored in < Connections install > /data/local/catalog/index
and CATALOG_REPLICATION_DIR is stored in < Connections install > /data/shared/catalog/indexReplication
there is also a temporary folder in your os tmp directory called indexCreationDir in the case of most linux systems it is /tmp/indexCreationDir
When you run your data migration and delete the search index under < Connections install > data/local/search ( I normally rename the index folder to #index)
also rename or remove the Places folder under < Connections install >/data/local/catalog/index/ and < Connections install > /data/shared/catalog/indexReplication and remove or rename the /tmp/indexCreationDir
once you restart Connections run an index now to rebuild the indexes, seedlist and the catalog data and your search will function as expected.
for example:
execfile(“searchAdmin.py”)
SearchService.indexNow(“activities, blogs, calendar, communities, dogear, files, forums, profiles, status_updates, wikis”)
I am sure that our resident Community script guru (Mr Christoph Stoettner) could script clearing these but for now its a manual process – hope this will save you some head aches on upgrades and migrations 🙂