Funnelback 8.0.0

Release notes for Funnelback 8.0.0

Released : 30th May 2008

Upgrade issues

• Database collections have changed in layout, and now require an additional 'primary key' parameter. Please see the version 8 database collection upgrade guide for details.
• Perl 5.8.8 is strongly recommended for all platforms:
  • Some features do not work out of the box under Perl 5.10 and Solaris.
  • Perl 5.8.5 and earlier have a bug in HTML::Entities, which may lead to incorrect encoding of apostrophes in the Funnelback system.
• Queries are now logged in their expanded form, not their pre-expansion form.

New features

• Document gathering from Microsoft Sharepoint and Lotus Domino
• Faceted navigation
• User tagging of results
• User feedback on results
• Basic Chinese / Japanese / Korean / Thai (CJKT) support
• Feeds API
• Crawling of content behind web forms
• Automatically generated "support package"

Improvements

• Allow pre/post commands to use collection.cfg parameters
• Broken link detection script for featured pages
• Capability for fetching resources at query time for multiple collection types (databases, filecopy, TRIM)
• Context sensitive help links open in new pages, not the current page
• Display real-time collection update status on the admin UI home page
• Import and export of featured pages and query expansions
• Instant updates support filecopy collections
• Instant update support for more collection types
• Java is bundled with Funnelback
• Logs for a collection go in a collection specific log dir, not the "system logs" dir
• Log text on the "view file" page is more readable
• Numerous improvements to form parsing (fixes for nested tags, res* tags that contain curly braces, etc)
• Option to remove all data during uninstall
• Reporting uses much less memory
• Reports are viewable while they are generating, and a reporting error will no longer leave the reports unusable
• Significantly improved database search, with "workflow" interface, incremental gathering and compressed storage
• Support for extracting links from Javascript generated web pages
• Updates for all collection types may now be halted (the halt may not occur until the end of the current update phase for some collection types)
• When upgrading an installation, the license key is preserved

Selected bug fixes

• Add support for filtering .dot (MS Word Template) files
• Admin UI should include crawler.reject_files in its processing of the "file types to crawl" checkboxes
• Allow collection parameter editing security model (parameter whitelists) to be applied on a per collection basis
• Allow / ignore whitespace in various collection parameters
• Ampersands in query* parameters are not parsed correctly
• cache.cgi displays "XML parsing error" for pages in funnelback_documentation
• cache.cgi does not perform security checks
• cache.cgi links do not get properly URL encoded parameters
• cache.cgi should strip meta refresh from its displayed contents to avoid sending users to incorrect locations
• Cached XLS files don't display correctly in IE6
• Can enter empty featured page and query expansion
• Can't map the same xpath to multiple metadata classes
• Change crawler to use MIME type rather than URL suffix when storing binary files
• Check windows password is valid in installer
• .ckpt index files should be removed by default
• click.cgi links does not properly URL encode arguments
• Clicking on filecopy results displays text in the error log
• Click tracking not working by default
• collection.cfg settings not being updated to point at new locations on an upgrade
• Collection parameter whitelist not greying out fields
• Collection summary rows should show successful update (green tick) after a successful index upgrade
• Command line administration / Unix scheduling / Apache integration will not work if the Perl binary is not at /usr/bin/perl
• Command line updates fail if not started from the bin directory
• crawler_binaries parameter not being updated properly on an upgrade
• Creating local collections with an unfindable source directory displays a confusing error message
• _disabled__see_start_urls_file parameter being displayed in update log
• Documentation CSS is indexed in the funnelback_documentation collection
• Enable data reports for web collections on an upgrade
• Filters not picking up title metadata from some Word docs
• Fluster crashes when a query contains "(" or ")"
• Fluster links have redundant CGI parameters
• funnelback_documentation collection shouldn't be deletable from admin interface
• Funnelback installer should complain if empty input is given for some fields
• htpasswd_modify is not fixed in an upgrade
• Improved handling of URL case sensitivity in the crawler
• Incorrect handling of numeric entities in crawled URLs
• Investigate fallback for external filters
• Investigate how to make query expansion work with Fluster
• java_libraries contain duplicated path after upgrade
• Local collection url prefixes don't work as expected
• Long logs are difficult to scroll
• new-collection.pl does not create start.urls file
• Old Jetty HTTPS server not shut down during upgrade
• Padre displays result counts in minresults mode
• PADRE failing to parse XML with empty elements
• Padre date sorts don't work for documents in the 16th / 17th century
• Padre produces invalid XML for some documents that contain ampersands in their title
• Padre segfault under rare combinations of gscopes and metadata searches
• Parsing of meta parameters is broken
• PDF not extracted correctly but output file with binary content was created
• PDF results include shell error output
• Permission errors under IIS
• Remove trailing space in spelling suggestions
• Reporting date routines do not handle leap years
• Report links do not work under IIS
• rss.cgi crashes when xsltproc is not found
• RTF files filtered in trim collections do not have meaningful titles
• Schedule updates page on windows incorrectly handles invalid input
• Security violation displayed when empty filename is submitted for upload
• Start URL parameter in instant update add doesn't check for a protocol
• The "results can't be displayed because this collection has never updated" page looks awful
• Various .cgi files do not have execute permission
• Very rare hang caused by schtasks when upgrading from Funnelback 6.0.x to Funnelback 7.0.x
• Viewing data reports forces the user displayed on the header to "admin"
• Visual bugs when viewing administration under IIS
• When editing a collection, changes are lost when navigating between tabs
• Word expansion does not work with query_* parameters