The Role of Style Files

The characteristics of a collection that are determined by style files are summarized in the following table.

Collection characteristic
Configuration Styles Used
Filters used to format source documents for indexing and display
style.dft style.uni
Fields included in the documents table
style.ddd (Do not edit!) style.sfl style.ufl
Contents of the word index
style.prm style.go style.stp style.lex
Gateway used to access source documents
style.vgw (Do not edit!)

The Indexing Manger uses style files located in this directory by default:

installdir/s97is/locale/english/styles/

Predefined style files for use with the command-line spider are located in this directory:

installdir/common/style/

Style files can be configured to implement various collection characteristics. These characteristics affect features you may want to incorporate into your search application. For example, when custom fields are defined, the fields can be displayed in results lists and used to perform field searches. The word index can be configured to include or exclude certain strings and/or words-this affects which documents will match a given query based on the query terms provided.

The Verity spider (both the Indexing Manager and command-line spider) uses an HTTP gateway called vgw_url to index documents. Both the style directories for the Indexing Manager and the command-line spider include a style.vgw file which specified the location of the vgw_url gateway.

The style.vgw and style.ddd files must not be edited manually. If you wish to edit other style files, you should make a backup of a predefined style directory before making edits. For complete information about editing style files, refer to Verity Collection Building Guide.



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