Constellio dev environment

Disclaimer: This blog is not really new, as it’s just the migration of the technical content of our website – see further down for the French version.

This tutorial explains how to start Constellio in a development environment. The first part shows how to download, setup and start Constellio in Eclipse with the default database (Derby). The second part shows how to install MySQL and to configure Constellio to use this database. Continue reading

Backup Constellio Collections and Connectors

Disclaimer: This blog is not really new, as it’s just the migration of the technical content of our website – see further down for the French version.

English: This tutorial explains how to backup and restore Collections and Connectors in Constellio.

French: Cette vidéo explique comment sauvegarder puis restaurer des Collections et des Connecteurs dans Constellio. Continue reading

Create a plugin for Constellio

Disclaimer: This blog is not really new, as it’s just the migration of the technical content of our website – see further down for the French version.

France Labs, the european partner of Doculibre on the Constellio solution, gives you this video explaining how to create a plugin for Constellio. Constellio is currently the most complete open source enterprise search solution available. Continue reading

Virtual Image for Constellio 1.3

Disclaimer: This blog is not really new, as it’s just the migration of the technical content of our website – see further down for the French version.

Open source is like that, you want to give it a try by yourself. In order to for you to gain time, we set up a virtual box image of a running Constellio.
This way you can right start playing with the search and with the admin interface. So that it works right away, we even put a sample collection with a connector that crawls by default the France Labs website. So the first customisation we’d recommend is to edit this connector in order to point to the website you desire, for instance your local intranet in case you have one. The image is approx 500 MB big, so please be patient. Continue reading

Slow Constellio admin interface

During a customer installation of Constellio 1.3, we have noticed an utterly slow loading of the admin interface, which is rather unusual (it is not that slow on other installs with the same amount of indexed content).
After an analysis, we have identified that the Constellio admin UI triggers every 5 seconds a query to its Solr, in order to know the number of indexed files, so as to update this figure in its admin UI. And in our particular installation, this query was taking an awful time to be processed (although the user queries were very fast). We could have changed the query frequency, but even the query by itself was slow. So we decided to change the query in order to have a much better query time. Continue reading

Searching everything = Talend + Constellio + Solr

We are preparing a series of blog entries for January/February 2013, related to combining Talend, Constellio and Solr in order to benefit from the power of Talend to have way more connectors to be used in combination with Constellio. We didn’t have time yet to work on a pure Talend + Solr solution, which would leverage ManifoldCF, so our entries will be about using the Google Connector Manager used in Constellio 1.3

Don’t hesitate to share with us if it is a blog series that is exciting for you.

Constellio 1.3 architecture part 3

Waiting for the 2.0 version of Constellio, we have decided to draw and explain the system architecture of Constellio 1.3
We thought it could help better understanding the way things work. This entry does not cover how these components are mapped to java classes, servlets, files and databases, but it gives a good overview of how it works.

This is the third and last entry of a series, as it would take too much time and space to explain all the components in one entry. Continue reading

Activating early binding in Constellio 1.3

Waiting for Constellio V2.0, we thought you may be interested in seeing how to activate early binding in Constellio 1.3
As a reminder, there are two ways to manage security for documents search: early binding and late binding. By security management, we mean the fact that an authorised user in a search engine is allowed to see as an answer to a search request, only the results he is actually allowed to see.
Early binding is the recommended way as it provides the fastest answer time. It consists in storing as part of the index the ACL (Access Control List) of the indexed documents, as an additional field of the Lucene index. Thus, when someone does a search, his username is appended to the search query, and there is a field filtering based on his username. The pros is that it only impacts the search time by the time it takes to filter on a field (which means a very small overhead). The con is that the documents ACLs are only synchronised when the documents are recrawled and reindexed. So if you plan a crawl everynight, your indexed ACLs will only be updated every night, hence generating a potential one day discrepancy. Still, this is the recommended way for standard scenarios, as most enterprise needs don’t require a to-the-minute update of the ACLs of files. Continue reading

Constellio 1.3 architecture part 2

Waiting for the 2.0 version of Constellio, we have decided to draw and explain the system architecture of Constellio 1.3
We thought it could help better understanding the way things work. This entry does not cover how these components are mapped to java classes, servlets, files and databases, but it gives a good overview of how it works.

This is the second entry of a series, as it would take too much time and space to explain all the components in one entry. Continue reading