Overview of free-text search plugins

PolicyCenter free-text search depends on two Guidewire plugins that connect PolicyCenter to a full-text search engine. The search engine is a modified form of Apache Solr in a special distribution known as the Guidewire Solr Extension. The Guidewire Solr Extension runs in a different instance of the application server than the instance that runs your PolicyCenter application.

The free-text search plugin interfaces are:

ISolrMessageTransportPlugin
Called by the Indexing System rules in the Event Fired ruleset whenever policies change. The plugin extracts the changed data and sends it in an indexing document to the Guidewire Solr Extension for loading and incremental indexing.
ISolrSearchPlugin
Called by the Search Policies > Basic search screen to send users’ criteria to the Guidewire Solr Extension and receive the search results.

PolicyCenter provides the plugin implementations and the Guidewire Solr Extension software. Do not connect the free-text plugins to your own installation of Apache Solr.

Important: Guidewire does not support replacing the plugin implementations that PolicyCenter provides with custom implementations to other full-text search engines. Guidewire supports connecting the free-text plugins only to a running instance of the Guidewire Solr Extension.

Connecting the free-text plugins to the Guidewire Solr Extension

If you configure free-text search for external operation, the free-text plugins connect to the Guidewire Solr Extension through the HTTP protocol. The plugin implementations obtain the host name and port number for the Guidewire Solr Extension application from parameters in the solrserver-config.xml file. In the base configuration, the port parameter specifies the standard Solr port number, 8983. If you set up the Guidewire Solr Extension with a different port number, modify the port parameter to match your configuration.

In the base configuration, the host parameter specifies localhost, which generally is correct for development environments. For production environments however, Guidewire requires that you set up the application server instance for the Guidewire Solr Extension on a host separate from the one that hosts PolicyCenter. For production environments, you must modify the host parameter to specify the remote host where the Guidewire Solr Extension runs.

If you configure free-text search for embedded operation, the plugins connect to the Guidewire Solr Extension without using the HTTP protocol. With embedded operation, the Guidewire Solr Extension runs as part of the PolicyCenter application, not as an external application. With embedded operation, the plugins ignore any host name and port number parameters specified in solrserver-config.xml. Free-text search does not support embedded operation in production environments.

Enabling and disabling the free-text plugins

The free-text plugins are disabled in the base configuration of PolicyCenter. After you enable the free-text plugins, you must perform the following actions for the plugin implementations to fully operate:

  • Set the FreeTextSearchEnabled parameter in config.xml to true.
  • Enable the PCSolrMessageTransport message destination, which the ISolrMessageTransportPlugin requires.

After you enable the free-text plugins, use the FreeTextSearchEnabled parameter to toggle them on and off, along with other free-text resources.

Running the free-text plugins in debug mode

You can run the free-text plugins in debug mode. With debug mode enabled, the plugins generate messages on the server console to help you debug changes to free-text search fields. The free-text plugin implementations have a debug plugin parameter that lets you enable and disable debug mode. You can enable debug separately for each plugin.

In the base configuration, the debug parameters are set to true. To use free-text search in a production environment, set the debug parameters for each plugin to false.

Important: You must set the debug parameters to false in a production environment.