What is cacheless search?

Cacheless search allows you to perform spatial search of the live (latest) configured product data that is persistent in the Teamcenter database. It is not necessary to maintain secondary structure data caches or to create a separate database.

The cacheless search engine must be used instead of the QPL and appearance-based search engines that were available in earlier versions of Teamcenter. All the functionality provided by the earlier search engines is also available with cacheless search. Unlike appearance and QPL searches, cacheless searches are performed on recent data, and not on data that was saved the previous day.

The audience for this information is administrators and Teamcenter services personnel who are tasked with deploying cacheless search.

You can configure cacheless search for one of three modes:

NX based

Configure this mode if you exclusively use NX as your CAD solution.

JT based

Configure this mode if you exclusively use CAD solutions other than NX.

Mixed

If you work in a multi-CAD environment, you must configure both NX and JT modes.

To use cacheless search, populate the database with the following objects:

Teamcenter bounding boxes (bbox data)

Bounding boxes must be created for all structures you want to search. Bounding boxes are attached to their owning item revisions and to their geometry source, either a CAD or JT dataset.

To create bounding boxes, run the create_or_update_bbox_and_tso utility.

(Optional) TruShape (TSO) voxel files. TruShape files provide more accurate results but occupy additional space in the database.

To create TSO files, run the create_or_update_bbox_and_tso utility.

Spatial search indexes

Index queue

Teamcenter creates the index queue to hold objects that require their indexes to be created or updated. Depending on your deployment strategy, the items may be restricted to one or more selected products in the database.

Note: This queue is transient and gets used by the index update process as the objects in the queue get processed and incorporated in the spatial index.

Once you have generated the initial data, you must keep it updated to reflect changes to the CAD designs. There are two methods of doing this:

• Using Dispatcher
• Using a cron job or service

You can choose one of two deployment strategies when creating bounding boxes and search indexes:

Full database

Use this strategy if you have relatively small products or designs for only a few products.

Product-scoped cacheless search

Use this strategy if you want to exclude data from products that are complete or inactive from the search results.

Related Topics

• Setting up live background updates
• Setting up Dispatcher to manage updates (NX)
• Setting up cron jobs
• Preparing your data