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Profiles

A profile contains presentation settings and search scoping configuration for a collection.

A profile can be seen as a subset of a collection containing its own presentation settings (best bets, curator, synonyms, ...), its own templates and its own analytics. A profile doesn't have an index and will use the index of the collection it exists on, however the search results returned from a profile can be scoped down in various ways (usually via Gscopes).

For example, a university search could be based on a single collection (a crawl of the university website) but have 2 profiles: A profile for students and a profile for staff members. The student profile would not include content from the staff pages, whereas the staff profile may include all crawled content. Both profiles will have their own Analytics, allowing to distinguish student searches from staff searches.

A profile is usually enabled as a search service to indicate it is a search endpoint that should be made available on the dashboard. Non-service profiles will not have access to the dashboard optimisation tools (curator, best bets, ...) however they can be used for search (with their profile-specific templates) and will record analytics data.

The profile to use when querying Funnelback can be specified as a URL parameter in the form ...&profile=<profile>..., e.g. search.html?collection=university&profile=staff.

Default profile

All collections contain a default profile named _default. This profile cannot be deleted.

When no &profile=... parameter is present in the URL the _default profile will be used.

Profile on-disk storage

In practice profiles are a set of folders inside the collection configuration folder (i.e. $SEARCH_HOME/conf/<collection>/<profile>/). Each profile has a preview and live view in order to support publishing of configuration settings. The preview folder is suffixed with _preview.

For example if the university collection has a student and a staff profile, the following folders will be present:

  • $SEARCH_HOME/conf/university/student and $SEARCH_HOME/conf/university/student_preview
  • $SEARCH_HOME/conf/university/staff and $SEARCH_HOME/conf/university/staff_preview
  • $SEARCH_HOME/conf/university/_default and $SEARCH_HOME/conf/university/_default_preview for the default profile.

Profile configuration

Each profile folder contains profile-specific configuration files such as:

  • Templates (*.ftl files)
  • Best bets, curator, synonyms, tuning configuration files
  • profile.cfg with profile / service specific settings such as the service name and thumbnail
  • padre_opts.cfg containing query processor options specific to that profile

Managing profiles and services

Profiles can be managed in the administration interface via the administer tab and the manage profiles link.

ManageProfiles.png

From this screen existing profiles can be deleted, and new profiles can be created.

ManageProfilesScreen.png

Creating services from the administration interface home page.

Profiles can be enabled as search services by clicking on the create service link available on the administration interface home page.

CreateService.png

Once enabled, the view service in the marketing dashboard link will allow accessing the profile reports and configuration.

ViewService.png

Administration interface user access to profiles

Users with access to a collection do not automatically have access to profiles that are set up in the collection. Access to profiles needs to be granted via the user management screens.

See also

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