Configuring the EPiServer CMS Source to Crawl the File Manager

The File Manager is an EPiServer CMS section where all the files uploaded to the EPiServer CMS installation reside. It is a virtual file system hosted in the Web server. The Coveo connector can access these files through the Coveo Web service.

Example: You may want to crawl and index the content of the File Manager because it contains files that are not referenced from any pages so that users will be able to search for their content.

You instruct the connector to index the File Manager by adding the FileManagerConfigurationString hidden parameter to the EPiServer CMS source. The value of this parameter is the configuration string that contains the list of starting points to crawl in the File Manager.

Each starting point represents a virtual path provider, which gives access to the files it hosts. In the configuration string, each starting point is composed of two values:

• Virtual path provider Name

• Virtual path provider VirtualPath

You can find these values in the episerver.config file associated with the EPiServer CMS website that you are crawling.

Note: When you want to index only downloadable documents referred from links in pages, you should rather use an optional configuration file to instruct the connector to do so (see Creating and Using an EPiServer CMS Configuration File).

To configure the EPiServer CMS source to crawl the File Manager

1. Identify the starting points that you want to crawl in the EPiServer CMS File Manager:

   1. Using a text editor, open the episerver.config configuration file for the EPiServer website that you are crawling.

      Example: For the MyEPiServerSite site the file can be in C:\EPiServer\Sites\MyEPiServerSite\episerver.config.

   2. In the configuration file, look for the <virtualPath> node.

   3. Inside this node, look for the <providers> node that contains <add ...> nodes, one for each starting point.

   4. For each starting point that you want to crawl note the values of the Name and VirtualPath attributes.

2. Build the configuration string specifying the starting points to crawl:

   1. For each starting point, directly concatenate the values of the Name and VirtualPath attributes.

   2. Separate starting point strings by a semicolon character.

      Example: The default starting point Documents in EPiServer CMS has the following Name=SiteDocuments and VirtualPath=~/Documents/ attribute values. The default starting point Global Files has the Name=SiteGlobalFiles and VirtualPath=~/Globabl/ attribute values. The resulting string to crawl both starting points is: SiteDocuments~/Documents;SiteGlobalFiles~/Global/.

3. Add the FileManagerConfigurationString hidden parameter to the EPiServer CMS source and use the string built in the previous step for the parameter value (see Modifying Hidden EPiServer CMS Source Parameters).