DocFetcher Server 1.3 is out. This release comes with an assortment of bugfixes and two new features that could be considered quite important depending on your use case.
The first new feature is that the web interface can now be opened with a ?q= URL parameter to immediately run a search with the query specified via the URL parameter. Here’s an example of what the full URL to the web interface might look like: https://example.com/search/?q=dog cat
One use case for the new URL parameter is launching DocFetcher Server searches programmatically or from a terminal. Another use case is that you can now select some text on a website, and then with the help of a browser extension quickly initiate a DocFetcher Server search with the selected text as the query.
The second new feature is new path mapping facility. This addresses the following use case: Let’s say you have a DocFetcher Server instance running on a Linux server and indexing documents located or mounted at /path/to/documents. Furthermore, the clients connecting to the DocFetcher Server instance all happen to be running on Windows. The problem is that the indexed documents are also accessible to the clients, but at a completely different mount point, e.g., X:\docs, and for some reason or other the clients need to directly open the files under X:\docs, rather than download copies of them through the web interface. Handling this use case was not possible in previous DocFetcher Server versions, now it is. In the new version, you can configure the DocFetcher Server instance to modify file paths on their way to the clients so that for example /path/to/documents is seen by clients as X:\docs.
An important caveat here is that due to the fact that the web interface is forced to run in a browser sandbox, it is not capable of directly opening files under X:\docs with the client’s local viewer application (such as Microsoft Word). So the new DocFetcher Server version comes with an additional workaround to make the process of directly opening files less painful: You can now click the file icon of a result to copy the result’s file path to the clipboard. Afterwards, you can paste the copied file path into your file manager to open the file. (Note: The action to perform when clicking the file icon can be set in the Admin Area. The default action is to download the file, not to copy its path.)
As for bugfixes in the new DocFetcher Server version, perhaps the most notable ones concern the checkbox states in the Search Scope pane, the processing of PDF annotations, and RTF bodies of Outlook emails:
- As you probably know, to filter search results by location, you can tick and untick the checkboxes in the Search Scope pane in the bottom-left of the web interface. In previous versions, there was a major bug though: The checkbox states were reset after the associated index was updated or rebuilt on the server side. This became a noticeable problem if indexes were updated frequently.
- Previously, there were certain PDF annotations that were indexed and searchable, but not shown in the preview pane. Also, PDF annotations placed on empty pages were completely ignored.
- Previously, the RTF bodies of Outlook emails were completely ignored. Now they are properly indexed just like plain text and HTML email bodies.
For the full list of changes in this release, please see the changelog.