Extending the search schema

In this lesson, more fields are added to the search schema that can be searched. To make relational data extensions searchable, they must be extracted and stored in the search index. That is, the field definitions must be added to the search schema file.

Typically, WebSphere Commerce data is stored in a relational database. In WebSphere Commerce search, another repository also stores WebSphere Commerce data. That is, the product information is stored in a search index for searching purposes. Most of the data that are stored in the search index is extracted from the relational database. Similar to the database schema, the search index also contains a schema. The fields that are defined in this schema are used by WebSphere Commerce search. This tutorial demonstrates how additional data that is added to the WebSphere Commerce relational schema as part of extension can be extracted and stored in the search schema so that it can be searched. To do so, assuming the additional relational table and the data exist in the database, the first step is to define fields in the search schema that store the data to be searched. Once the new fields are defined, the mappings must be configured for the fields to the database schema.

About this task

Procedure

Add more fields to the search schema that can be searched.
1. Navigate to the following directory:
  - WCDE_installdir/search/solr/home/MC_10001/en_US/Catalogentry/conf
  - WC_installdir/instances/instance_name/search/solr/home/MC_10001/en_US/Catalogentry/conf
  This directory contains the Master catalog folder, in which there are the configurations files for each language.
2. Open the schema.xml file.
Under the <fields> section, add the following new fields to be indexed by search:
```

<field name="warterm" type="wc_text" indexed="true" stored="true" multiValued="false" />
<field name="wartype" type="wc_text" indexed="true" stored="true" multiValued="false" />
<field name="careinstruction" type="wc_text" indexed="true" stored="true" multiValued="false" />
```
When stored is set to true, the original information is stored in the index, making whether the field is tokenized or non-tokenized irrelevant. If you want to retrieve the field to display it, you must set stored to true, otherwise, you can search on the field only. For more information, see Structured content.
Note: To make the new searchable customization fields work properly within workspaces, copy your customized schema.xml file to the workspace core directories.
```
WC_installdir\instances\instance_name\search\solr\home\MC_10001\en_US\CatalogEntry_WCR10x\conf\
```
where x represents all cores.
Save your changes and close the file.

Results

This lesson extends the search schema for the English locale, en_US, only. For other languages, complete this lesson by updating the schema.xml files in the appropriate locale folders.