Overview of free-text search setup

PolicyCenter free-text search depends on a full-text search engine, the Guidewire Solr Extension. In a production environment, Guidewire supports running the Guidewire Solr Extension in a standalone mode. In a development environment, Guidewire supports running the Guidewire Solr Extension in the bundled QuickStart server, if you configure free-text search for embedded operation.

Free-text search options for production and development

In a production environment, you must configure the free-text search for external operation. With external operation in a production environment, the Guidewire Solr Extension must run in a different instance of the application server than the instance that runs your PolicyCenter application.

In a development environment, you can configure free-text search for external or embedded operation. With external operation in a development environment, the Guidewire Solr Extension runs in a Java Virtual Machine (JVM) instance rather than in the server that runs your PolicyCenter application. With embedded operation, the Guidewire Solr Extension runs automatically as part of the PolicyCenter application in the application server instance that runs PolicyCenter, not as a separate application.

You can configure free-text search for external or embedded operation in development environments installed on a Tomcat application server or on the bundled QuickStart application server. You can configure free-text search only for external operation in development environments installed on other supported application servers. Production environments support only external operation regardless of application server.

Note: In PolicyCenter, you can avoid setting up the free-text batch load process in small-scale development environments. In such a case, use the Sync Policy Index feature. In production deployments, Guidewire strongly recommends that you configure the free-text batch load process.

Simplified free-text search setup with embedded operation

In a development environment, set up the free-text search for embedded operation to simplify your setup procedure. Your only set-up task in embedded operation involves changes to the solrserver-config.xml file. This file configures how PolicyCenter works with the Guidewire Solr Extension, including connection information, and whether the mode of operation is external or embedded.

Guidewire Solr extension

Guidewire provides a special distribution of the Apache Solr full-text search engine, the Guidewire Solr Extension. Guidewire provides the Guidewire Solr Extension in a Zip file in the following location in the PolicyCenter installation directory:

solr/pc-gwsolr.zip

The Guidewire Solr Extension runs self-hosted in a production-grade Jetty container server. If you configure the Guidewire Solr Extension for embedded operation, it operates as part of PolicyCenter, not as a separate web application.

Warning: Do not use any distribution of the Apache Solr full-text search engine other than the one that Guidewire provides as the Guidewire Solr Extension.

Guidewire Solr home directory

Before you implement free-text search, you must create an installation directory for the Guidewire Solr Extension. The installation directory is known as the Guidewire Solr home directory. Guidewire requires that you create the Guidewire Solr home directory on the host on which you installed the separate application server instance for it.

Note: Do not create a Guidewire Solr home directory if you configure free-text search for embedded operation.

The default parameter settings and configuration files for free-text search assume the following directories for the Guidewire Solr home directory:

Unix – /opt/gwsolr
Windows – C:\opt\gwsolr

All Guidewire free-text setup instructions assume the use /opt/gwsolr for the Guidewire Solr home directory. If you do not install the Guidewire Solr Extension in its default directory, you must perform additional configuration steps.