Adding an External Field to the Index

External Fields are useful in cases where you may want to update a particular field in some documents more often than you want to update others. For example, you may have implemented a document rank based on the number of views, and you want to update the rank of all of the documents daily or hourly. Normally, you would need to update each document just to change the rank. Adding an External Field is much more efficient, because all document values for a particular field are stored in a single external file that you can update as often as you wish.

You store the values for an External Field in a file outside of the index. The file contains mappings from a key field to the field value, so instead of specifying the field in documents as they are indexed, Voyager finds values for this field in an external file.

Adding an External Field

To add an external field:

• Go to Manage Voyager > Index > External Fields

Open

• Enter the name of the new field and click Create

Open

NOTES:

• Voyager creates a text file in the index directory, for example:
  data\indexV2\v0\external_fext_[new field name].txt You canEdit the field values, Reload the field or Delete it entirely.

• New External Fields are only loaded when Voyager starts up, and changes to the field will appear after re-scanning the index.

• You can add this field to the default query using Append Parameters in Query Settings.