25 April 2015, 11:13

We have about 200 or so terms and phrases that we would like to add to various content for organization purposes. Three questions:

1) When a user tags content within their private space or within a group or anywhere for that matter, do these then get picked up in the elastic search regardless of that users access permissions?

2) If one or more of such terms or phrases get added to the content in the description area of a page or collection, will elastic search find it?

3) What is best practice to add terms or phrases to individual files?

Thanks so much

26 April 2015, 15:16

Hello Dirk,

Elasticsearch, i.e. the fulltext search in Mahara respects the access permissions. Thus, if you tag a file with "calgary" and put it on a page that you share with a colleague of yours but not me, your colleague will find it through the fulltext search, but I will not know that you have such a file because I don't have access to it.

The fulltext search finds anything that is in the database, i.e. titles, descriptions, tags, text that you entered in a note or textbox and file descriptions etc. You can find all your things in it, but other people can only find things to which they have access as part of page or group permissions.

The search re-indexes content every so often (every few minutes I think it was) so that your content is discoverable pretty quickly.

As far as tags go, I still like the one word approach so that it's also clear in the tag cloud what belongs together. It makes searching easier esp. if you have a tag like "learning technology" because if you write it as "learningtechnology" or "LearningTechnology", you can be sure that you only find the content for which you asked your students to use that particular tag and not everything else where learning technology is mentioned. Others might have a different view on that.

Cheers

Kristina