DNN Search (index documents)

Question

I got a question regarding the search module of DNN. I am currently using DNN community edition 7.4 and I want to index PDF documents so that I can search on the content of the PDF files.

Now after a lot of research I found the following conclusions:

• By default DNN does not support this. You can enable this by using external modules as: Dnn search engine and Search boost 3.2
• Community edition does not allow to index documents but only pages. The professional edition does include indexing documents and paging.

Now I am wondering are these conclusions valid? If I upgrade my community edition then can I index documents and if I keep using the community edition my only option is buying external modules?

Answer 1

You are correct.

The Evoq (professional) editions have three search crawler schedule tasks that index different types of content:

• File Crawler will index any supported document file types in the File Manager to include in the search results. This crawler will parse files such as PDF and Office documents.
• Site Crawler will index module content from HTML modules as well as any third-party modules that support the search integration.
• Url Crawler will crawl and parse HTML pages typically on external urls where you cannot get the content directly from the CMS with the Site crawler.

The DNN Community edition only comes with the Site Crawler. So if you need file parsing and indexing, you will need to use a third-party module like Searchboost or upgrade to one of the Evoq editions.