Now, you can set the new catalog to track a virtual domain. By default, the catalog indexes the default domain on the Web server. To index the default domain, right-click the new catalog and select Properties. Click the Web tab, and select the Track Virtual Roots check box. From the Virtual Server drop-down menu, select the virtual domain that you want the catalog to track. Finally, save your changes, close MMC, then reopen it to refresh the data. Make sure the MMC version of the catalog agrees with your version before you proceed.
Reinitializing the FrontPage search component to use the Index Server catalog. From the IIS snap-in, right-click the virtual Web, select Task, then choose Recalculate Web from the list. Alternatively, you can use the FrontPage client to open the Web that uses the catalog. To put your FrontPage-generated search pages to work, choose Recalculate Hyperlinks from the Tools menu.
The Payoff: FrontPage Search Forms and Results
Last month, I went into the Active Server Pages (ASP) code for the Index Server search forms. Remember that the Content Index (CI) parameters can be difficult to track down and get right. FrontPage uses a prepackaged Search form that does all this work for you. Content authors can simply select a few check boxes to get search results; authors don't need to do any scripting.
To create a search page, open the Web site in FrontPage, then choose File, New, Page to display the FrontPage-supplied page templates. Select the Search Page template. FrontPage will create a new page that includes all the Web site defaults (e.g., the Web theme, shared borders) and a FrontPage search form, which Figure 2 shows.
The FrontPage editor shows a dotted line around the form on the Web page. To view the results page properties and the default CI parameter properties, right-click inside the form and select Search Form Properties. Figure 3 shows the Search Results tab with the available scope (i.e., the directories included in the search) and display information options. If you look at the search page's HTML source, you'll see that the parameters you set on the Search Form Properties window are translated into variable names similar to those in last month's ASP scripted search form.
How the Scope Works
The Scope default (i.e., This web in Figure 3) is the current FrontPage Web default, which is the current Web. If the current Web is the virtual root, its children are part of its scope, so results from the search page are returned from all nonexcluded and unprotected subdirectories and Web sites under the virtual root. If the current Web is a subweb in a virtual domain, then results from the search page are returned only for that subweb.
If you select the Entire website scope, all nonexcluded and unprotected subdirectories, virtual directories, and subwebs will be included in the search. In WAIS, All is the default scope, and it's limited to the current Web. In Index Server, All includes all the nonexcluded directories in the virtual domain, starting at the domain's virtual root and including all the subwebs that the user has permissions to search.
You can also specify a particular directory for the search. To limit a user search to a specific subweb or directory other than the Web that contains the search page, simply type the name of the directory (without a slash or backslash). For example, if the search page resides in the virtual root zeus.ideva and I wanted to specify a search on subweb zeus.ideva/classads, I would type classads in the Directory text field, as Figure 4 shows. (I used this process to create a search page that searched only the forms results from the classified ads I created with the FrontPage Discussion Group Wizard.)
You can have FrontPage return search results from any virtual directory in the virtual domain. Just enter the virtual directory's name (as it appears in the IIS snap-in) in the Directory text box in the Search Form Properties dialog box. Make sure you've included the virtual directory in your ISS catalog and that you've selected the Index this directory check box on the virtual directory's Properties dialog box in the IIS snap-in.
About Security and Protected Webs
If a subweb in the virtual domain requires you to log on, then no search results will be returned from that subweb to any search page that resides outside the protected subweb. If you log on to the protected Web, you can use a search page that resides in that protected Web. If you create a search page inside a protected Web site or subweb, search results are returned from inside the protected Web site; if you select the Entire website option, the results page will include results from the rest of the domain as well.
I've gotten Index Server's sample ASP search forms to work reliably only on sites that allow Anonymous access. (See Brett Hill, "IIS Informant," July 2000, for information about Index Server security and this problem.) So, keep that in mind as you create and configure the virtual domain. The WAIS search engine works fine on secured sites.
The Search Results
As I've explained, you set up the search results page in the Search Form Properties dialog box. However, you can't control how the results appear on the results page. FrontPage adds all the selections you make in the Search Form Properties dialog box's Additional information to display in the search results list area to the table in the results page. The example results page in Figure 5 shows all the selections. (The Hit Count field records how many times the search text appears in the document; this field has nothing to do with the number of visitors.)
If an Office document populates the row, data will appear only in the Author, Comments, and Subject columns. Index Server takes these fields from the Office document Properties sheet. I haven't discovered a way to make the HTML documents' metatag information show up in these fields.
This results page isn't nearly as fancy or flexible as the Index Server ASP sample search page in last month's column. FrontPage's results page doesn't use the more advanced CI functions. To get more sophisticated search capabilities or results displays that include abstracts and highlighted hits, you can modify and add one of the Index Server sample search pages to the FrontPage Web.
Troubleshooting Catalogs
If you've installed Index Server on your server, you'll need to either create catalogs for the virtual domains in your server or edit the Registry so that some or all of the virtual domains in the server use the FrontPage WAIS search engine. Most of my Web-hosting customers are happy with one or the other of these two search engines and with the FrontPage-generated search and results pages. Users generate their own pages and don't need to wait for me to do something on the server. My corporate Internet and intranet customers are moving more and more toward Site Server search. If you're having trouble creating catalogs, see Table 1 for a couple of common Index Server problems and their solutions.
Register
