Initialize and set up a recurring task to update the Smart Discovery index using Teamcenter command prompt

Indexing structures makes the search faster and provides advanced structure filtering and configuration capabilities. For this, you must set up a recurring task to initialize and update the Smart Discovery index.

In this process:

• The Smart Discovery index in Solr is initialized with the necessary Teamcenter data.
• Items and their occurrences that are regularly updated, and new items that are frequently created in the Teamcenter database, are incrementally updated in the Smart Discovery index in Solr and in Teamcenter.
• If changes are made to the schema due to the addition of new occurrence properties, you must first run the discovery:index task, and then run the discovery:sync task. If you run the discovery:index task separately from the discovery:sync task, you must first stop the discovery:sync task already running, then run discovery:index followed by discovery:sync.

Before populating the Smart Discovery index in Solr, you can choose which properties of an item revision or an occurrence must be indexed.

Prerequisites

Given the complexity and time required for initializing the Smart Discovery index, ensure that your enterprise setup considers the following recommendations:

• Schedule the process of creating the Smart Discovery index on non-working days or outside of work hours. Initializing the Smart Discovery index for large structures may take several hours. To estimate the time required, initialize a medium-sized structure and scale the recorded time to match the structure sizes of your production setup.
• Increase the system and environment resources, server pool sizes, and timeout duration of the initializing process. Ensure that there are minimal to no connectivity issues in a wide area network environment, as the initialization process is highly communicative and may get interrupted by network restriction or congestion.
• Determine the maximum number of Teamcenter connections to be open at a time for indexing and update the value of the Tc.maxConnections parameter in %TC_ROOT%\TcFTSIndexer\conf\TcFtsIndexer.properties.
• Determine the number of parallel processes required to process the index initially and recurringly, and update the values of the following tuning parameters in %TC_ROOT%\TcFTSIndexer\conf\TcFtsIndexer_discovery.properties:
  • Discovery.maxConnectionPercentageForInitialIndex
  • Discovery.maxConnectionPercentage
• To monitor the progress of indexing, inspect TcFTSIndexer.discovery.log in %TC_ROOT%\TcFTSIndexer\logs.

Procedure

1. To set up the recurring task, use the runTcFTSIndexer utility:

   TC_ROOT/TcFTSIndexer/bin/runTcFTSIndexer -task=discovery:sync -interval=<time_interval_in_seconds>

   Specify the time interval in seconds depending on your environment requirements and the number of structures to be synchronized. A time interval of 120 seconds is ideal, but it is recommended not to set a time interval below 60 seconds.

   Note: Siemens Digital Industries Software recommends that you consult Customer Support before changing the default indexing interval of 120 seconds, to understand and analyze the impact of structure indexing in your Teamcenter environment.

2. At this stage, you can validate your enterprise setup before starting the Smart Discovery index creation process. Perform a basic test to ensure that TcFTSIndexer and Smart Discovery Indexing are set up correctly:

   TC_ROOT/TcFTSIndexer/bin/runTcFTSIndexer -task=discovery:test