Publish Content to an Enterprise Search Engine
The IBM Cognos Index Search installation includes a command line tool that you run to create IBM Cognos Index Search cards. Before you run this tool, you must create and run an Index Update Task in IBM Cognos Connection. For information about how your enterprise search engine indexes content, see the documentation for your enterprise search engine.
IBM Cognos index search cards are not required for OneBox integration.
Security Considerations
When a full-text search is run from IBM Cognos Connection or one of the IBM Cognos studios, the result set is filtered based on the access permissions of the user. The result set shows only those items that a user has permission to access. However, when a user runs a search from a third-party enterprise search engine, the result set may show some Cognos content, such as report name and description, that the user would not see when searching in the IBM Cognos portal. This is because the index search cards and the enterprise search engine are outside the IBM Cognos security framework. IBM Cognos security is applied when a user attempts to access an item from the search result set.
When creating index search cards, you can control security for Cognos content by using one or more of the following techniques:
- Limit the number of cards.
When you create the cards, use authentication information that provides access only to public content. This creates cards that represent a subset of the items referenced in the index. When a user runs an enterprise search, only public Cognos content can appear in the result set.
- Create different sets of cards.
Run the tool that creates the cards more than once using different authentication information. Each time that you run the tool you create a new set of cards that reference the content that the user profile has access to. If you use this technique, you must also manage collections and security using the administration tools of the enterprise search engine.
- Manage collections and security using the enterprise search engine
administration tools.
Your enterprise search engine provides options for controlling the possible result set for different users. This is typically accomplished by defining the content of different collections. A collection definition can include content locations, such as Web servers, or specific content, such as index search cards. You may not be able to duplicate IBM Cognos security settings using these options. You should test the search results to ensure that the expected security is achieved.
You use the following files and folders to expose IBM Cognos content to an enterprise search engine.
| Path and File Name |
Description |
|---|---|
| installation_location\bin\card\card.txt |
This text file contains information about the process used to create index search cards, and the parameters you can change for your environment. |
| installation_location\bin\card\card.bat (Windows) installation_location\bin\card\card.sh (UNIX) |
You run this batch file from a command line to create the cards. Unless anonymous access is enabled in IBM Cognos BI, you must provide namespace, user ID, and password to run the file. For more information, see the Installation and Configuration Guide. |
| installation_location\bin\card\card.xml |
Before you run card.bat, modify the parameters in this file to specify details about your environment. The default settings are appropriate for a proof of concept installation where all IBM Cognos components are installed on the same computer. |
| installation_location\indexes\card |
This folder is the default output location for the cards generated by card.bat. |