Search backend

Searching in Vidispine is implemented using either Solr or Elasticsearch as the backend. This allows functionality such as boolean operators, faceted searching, term highlighting, search term suggestions, etc.

Solr

Solr is the default search backend. It supports all features and works with both standalone Solr and SolrCloud.

Elasticsearch

Requirements

  • Elasticsearch 6.8.1
  • The analysis-icu plugin needs to be installed. If you are using Amazon Elasticsearch Service, this plugin is already installed.
  • Make sure to configure the search backend and that either the search backend URL or the elasticsearchPath property is set properly.
  • Run vidispine elasticsearch init to initialize Elasticsearch. If an Elasticsearch instance is initialized already, the initialization will not create a new index, unless the --recreate argument is used when initializing.
  • (Optional) Run vidispine elasticsearch init --percolator-index to initialize the “percolate query” index that is newly introduced in 5.6. This is useful for systems upgrading from an older version, and don’t want to re-initialize everything. (New in 5.6.)
  • Running vidispine elasticsearch check can be used to check if Elasticsearch is active already or should be initialized.

Limitations

The search interface is the same compared to using Solr (both syntactically and semantically), except that:

  • Collection-item join is not yet supported.
  • The noescape option in the “version 1” search document is not supported.
  • When searching using cursor for timed intervals, the same item or collection might be returned with different timespans on different result pages. This is because timespans are sorted independently, but grouped to items on a per-result-page basis.