The Metadata Plugin Metadata Management for Manila

Site last updated 2/24/2006; 12:33:21 PM

Home Why Features FAQ Updates Documentation Download Developers Bugs Feedback Discuss Planned Features				Rebuilding an Index As of 11/27/2000, we now have the capability of rebuilding the index for a given meta type. Hopefully you won't have to do this. But if you've been messing around in the indices, or a bug somewhere has corrupted your indices, or you've decided to recreate all your discussion group messages by hand inside Frontier, you may need to quickly rebuild an index. First, select the meta type whose index you'd like to rebuild. Note that you must have turned on indexing using the Managing Meta Types page before you can rebuild an index. Next, you have to make a big decision. You already know that your current index is going to be deleted and replaced by a fresh, nice-smelling one. But should the Metadata Plugin treat undefined meta values as blanks or as default values? If you have never defined default values for meta types (you'd see it on the Managing Meta Types page), you don't need to worry. Just leave the use default values box unchecked and click Rebuild Index. You're done. But let's talk for a moment about Fran. Fran has a site with 100 messages. She built the site, and after message number 50, it suddenly struck her that she wanted a meta type called fragrance. She wanted all new messages to have the value lilac for their default value. So she happily continued building her site, and the default value lilac was associated with each new message. Fran has 100 messages. The first 50 have an undefined value for the fragrance meta type, since that meta type had not yet been created when the messages were made. The second 50 all have the value lilac for the meta type fragrance. Fran wants to rebuild her index for the fragrance meta type. She has two choices. If she wants the default value, lilac, associated with each message as she rebuilds the index, she should check the box marked Use Default Values. If she wants to leave the messages the way they are (50 with, 50 without) she should leave the box unchecked. Fran makes her decision, clicks Rebuild Index, and takes the rest of the day off. A note about values which are not used anywhere. They will be blown away when we rebuild the index. Example: Joe has a site where he has recipes on each page. He has a meta type called Palatability and he uses a dropbox format to choose between the values Yummy, OK and Icky. Joe has 10 recipes on his site. 8 of them are Yummy and 2 of them are OK. Since Joe doesn't have any entries under the Icky portion of the database, after he rebuilds his index he will have only the values Yummy and OK. This could be worked around by adding code to keyIndex.act_buildIndex that would give the option to preserve empty index entries, but I don't have time for that now. Comments...