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Funnelback 15.14.0

Release notes for Funnelback 15.14.0

Released : 22 March 2018

Supported until: 22 March 2021 (Long Term Support Version)

15.14.0 - New features

  • Administration of metadata mapping and xml indexing has been overhauled. -- Adds more structure when defining metadata classes and sources for HTML and XML. -- Provides suggestion of common metadata sources within the target index. -- Adds clear inline help when configuring XML indexing options.
  • Underlying APIs for metadata mapping and xml indexing have been introduced.
  • Replaced web crawler HTTP processing, adding support for a range of modern HTTP protocol options, including gzip compression.

15.14.0 - Selected improvements and bug fixes

  • Accessibility Auditor now fetches documents for auditing via the same HTTP mechanism as the web crawler, allowing for form interaction, SSL and proxy settings to be applied.
  • Display of metadata fields in search results no longer requires the 'both' summary mode. Requested 'SF' summary field metadata is now returned regardless of the 'SM' summary mode.
  • Allow for content type and additional headers to be set per profile.
  • Fixed a number of errors in calculations for date facets.
  • Reduced memory usage in a number of components (e.g. metaspace when groovy scripts are reloaded, large padre packet compression in-memory).
  • Removed the accessibility auditor G4 check, which produced unhelpful noise on all documents.
  • Introduced a configurable limit on user-requested requested num_ranks - ui.modern.external_num_ranks_limit.
  • Unauthenticated users can now be blocked from preview profiles using the restrict_preview_to_authenticated_users option.
  • Facets are now accessible by name in groovy and freemarker templates by calling the getFacetByName method on the SearchResponse object for example transaction.response.getFacetByName("facet-name").
  • Social media custom templates are now configured via collection.cfg options, and have new metadata mappings.
  • The live URLs of documents from database and directory collections no longer refer to a legacy cgi script. The document's cache URL is now used.
  • Tracking of user click actions no longer relies on HTTP referrer headers.
  • Fixed problems in handling of default ports when canonicalising URLs.
  • Mediator PullLogs command now transfers sub-directories of logs recursively.
  • Removed some cases where XML documents were incorrectly treated as HTML.
  • Added support for Server Name Indication (SNI) when fetching SAML metadata.
  • Improved SAML configuration to allow independent configuration between admin and search.
  • Improved document title fixer to eliminate some additional undesirable titles.
  • Introduced post_collection_create_command setting to simplify initial collection creation in multi-server environments.
  • Introduced debugging API call for investigating crawler errors in form interaction.
  • Improved performance of query processing when very large numbers of metadata mappings are used.
  • Introduced an experimental option to prevent concurrent in-crawl form interaction - crawler.allow_concurrent_in_crawl_form_interaction.
  • Upgraded Freemarker library to 2.3.27 (from 2.3.25) which provides some new template syntax - See http://freemarker.org/docs/versions_2_3_27.html.
  • Upgraded to Tika 1.17 (from 1.10) which provides improved file filtering support - See https://github.com/apache/tika/blob/1.17/CHANGES.txt.
  • The JSONToXML filter no longer treats the JSON key content as a special value.

15.14.0 - Configuration Upgrade Steps

The following changes will be automatically performed on all configurations during the upgrade process. Configurations migrated from older versions after the upgrade will need to have update-configs.pl manually run to apply these changes.

  • Users with access to metamap.cfg and xml.cfg in Funnelback's file manager will be granted the new sec.metadata-mapping and sec.xml-index permissions.
  • Content Auditor metadata configuration will be set in collections containing an an existing metamap.cfg file to avoid them inheriting the new default long metadata name based configuration.
  • metamap.cfg files will be migrated to the new metadata-mapping.cfg format.
  • xml.cfg files will be migrated to the new metadata-mapping.cfg and xml-index.cfg formats.
  • Invalid lines in profile.cfg files (possibly from padre-arg-sw) will be removed.

15.14.0 - Upgrade Issues

  • Web crawl NTLM authentication no longer uses the same config settings as HTTP basic authentication. Web collections relying on NTLM authentication must be reconfigured to use the new crawler.ntlm.domain, crawler.ntlm.username and crawler.ntlm.password configuration settings.
  • Since the default summary field metadata value (i.e. -SF query processor option's default of [a,c,p,s]) is now visible without -SM being set, search frontends which set no SF vaule will return metadata for the a, c, p and s metadata classes.
  • The search interface no longer allows unnecessary activation of J2EE sessions and ui.modern.session.set_userid_cookie is no longer used - Cookies are automatically used as required if search session tracking is enabled.
  • Crawler Javascript link extraction is now off by default. Any collections relying on the old 'on' default must have it set directly during upgrade.
  • Support for instant-update style feeds (handle-feed.cgi) has been removed - Push collections are recommended as a replacement.
  • The workflow publish hook is no longer called with both the preview and live profile files. Instead it will always be called with one file path each time it is run. The hook now runs each time a profile file is edited in the classic admin UI and each time any config file is edited via the admin API this includes the marketing UI and implementer UI.
  • The JSONToXML filter has been updated such that it makes a better attempt at producing valid XML this can result in xml element names being modified as well as some characters being stripped from the content.

15.14.0 - Upcoming changes

  • A future version of Funnelback will remove the $SEARCH_HOME/lib/java/all directory in favour of using a new layout. If you are currently accessing this directory with workflow scripts or similar, you are encouraged to transition away from doing so, and to contact us to discuss any cases where transitioning is technically difficult.

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