Scheduled job for indexing

Introduction

This document describes scheduled jobs for an integration of EPiServer Find with EPiServer 7/7.5 CMS. The EPiServer.Find.Cms assembly ships with a scheduled job plug-in which allows for administrators to re-index the entire site from within the admin mode in EPiServer CMS. The job is named EPiServer Find CMS indexing job and can be started either manually or triggered using the standard scheduling functionality in EPiServer CMS.

You do not need to set up the indexing scheduled job to run automatically, since indexing is only needed at a first-time installation, or when doing clean-up or managing indexing failures. Changes to content will be instantly indexed. Having the indexing scheduled job run automatically at recurring intervals will only add unnecessary system load.

Using the scheduled job

There are primarily two scenarios for using the scheduled job:

• To index all pages after having installed the EPiServer Find CMS integration for the first time as, existing pages will not otherwise be indexed unless they are manually re-published.
• To handle situations where the automatic indexing has failed, or when pages should be re-indexed for some other reason. One such reason may be changes to the ACL (the access rights settings), as the automatic indexing does not trigger re-indexing for such changes by default.

When started manually, the job will (as all EPiServer jobs) run within the application pool of the IIS server and will be interrupted by IIS when the Idle Time-out passes. By default the timeout is set to 20 minutes. When indexing a large site it may take more than 20 minutes to finish the job and it is not advisable to increase the timeout to handle this. Therefore it is recommended to always trigger the job by scheduling, as it then will be executed by the EPiServer scheduled job process and will not be affected by the timeout.

At the completion of an indexing job, a report will be printed to the history log displaying execution time and the number of pages indexed.

Indexing job: Reindexing completed.
ExecutionTime: 0minutes 18seconds
Number of pages indexed: 180

Error notifications

When an error occurs, the report will notify where it occurred and give the error message. Two types of errors are counted:

• Page errors relating to filtering or loading page
• Batch errors relating to transmitting and indexing files to EPiServer Find

Example of error notification:

Indexing job: Reindexing completed.
ExecutionTime: 0minutes 16seconds
Number of pages indexed: 169
Number of page errors: 11
Number of batch errors: 0
An error occured while filtering Page: 113. 
The 'ShouldIndex' function could not be evaluated for Page: 113. 
ShouldIndex-exception. (see log for more information)

To see the stack trace, activate the logging functionality and trace it in your log file.