Using FTS thesauri in Faceted Search

General

Please refer to this item for an explanation of native thesauri in SQL Server's FTS and iFTS. Because the nature of these thesauri which affects the entire database instance, it is not recommended to fully depend on FTS or iFTS native thesauri. Instead, usage of Smartsite iXperion's thesauri is highly recommended as an alternative.

Managing thesauri

In spite of the global scope of the native FTS and iFTS thesauri and the storage as a physical file per language, Smartsite iXperion Faceted Search does provide a mechanism to manage a thesaurus using the native Smartsite iXperion thesauri.

After installation of Smartsite Faceted Search, one thesaurus is provided: IXS - Thesaurus (English) having code IXST_EN. This thesaurus resembles the sample FTS thesaurus with similar sample content. Note that there are two relation types: Expansion and Replacement for. The first relation type allows a term to relate to other terms as they were synonyms.

The other relation type simply replaces one or more search terms to a given term. A quite handy utility of this feature is to include some common made typos in the list of terms, having them related to the correctly spelled version. This way, it's even possible to enter several possible typos per term.

Exporting thesauri

In order to export a thesaurus in such a way that the native FTS thesaurus becomes aware of the changes made in the Smartsite UI, this thesaurus needs to be exported into xml and saved as a physical file on the SQL Server machine.

Exporting a Smartsite thesaurus can be done by invoking the stored procedure beneath in SSMS.

SQL	Copy Code
/* Stored procedure to transform a Smartsite thesaurus into a FTS thesaurus XML */ EXEC pr_tsExportThesaurus 'IXST_EN'

After invoking pr_tsExportThesaurus, the result that SSMS presents is a link (when invoked to grid, which is the default) which leads to a readable XML in another tab.

Simply copy-paste this XML into the file which is used as the FTS thesaurus. Please refer to this page for details.