Enabling and disabling full text search

Full text search (FTS) is installed by default with the BMC Remedy AR System server. This section discusses the capabilities, performance, and administration of the FTS feature.

This section contains information about:

• Setting up FTS to search across multiple forms
• Re-indexing considerations
• Defining a field for FTS
• How FTS indexing works
• Performing searches with FTS
• FTS index migration
• Enabling FTS high availability
• FTS Operation types

FTS is typically much faster than using the native database searching functionality when searching in long text fields. It is also the only method available in BMC Remedy AR System for searching text within attached documents.

With FTS, you can use your knowledge base. You can access your company's history of solving problems, which is sometimes stored in long text fields or attachments. With the FTS option, you can easily search long text fields to find solutions to related problems.

FTS solves many problems that users encounter when performing database searches, including:

• Searching long text and attachment fields. The FTS option enables you to index character, diary, and attachment fields for searching, and then matches entries from those fields against the search criteria that you specify. Like database indexes, an FTS index can greatly decrease the time required for a database search.
• Improving search performance by searching large volumes of data.
• Defining how the server interprets wildcards to customize search performance to your specific needs.
• Ranking search results according to their relevance to the search criteria. The more relevant a search result is, the greater the weight. For more information, see Causing accrued and weighted results with FTS.

To enable FTS

1. Install FTS with BMC Remedy AR System. (See Installing  in BMC Remedy ITSM Deployment online documentation.)
2. Configure the server for FTS. (See Configuring full text search.)
3. Index fields for FTS. (See Defining a field for FTS.)
4. (Optional) Add a form search field to a form. (See Providing a shortcut for specifying expanded FTS qualifications.)
5. (Optional) Set up forms for multiple-form FTS. (See Setting up FTS to search across multiple forms.)
6. Re-index, as needed. (See Re-indexing considerations.)

To disable FTS

You can disable the FTS feature temporarily or permanently. This setting does not apply to multi-form search.

To disable FTS temporarily

1. In a browser, open the BMC Remedy AR System Administration Console, and click System > General > Server Information.
2. On the FTS tab,
   To disable full text searching, select the Disable Full Text Searching check box.
   To disable FTS indexer, select the Disable FTS Indexer check box.

To disable FTS permanently

1. Open AR System Administration Console> System > General > Add or Remove Licenses.
2. Select the BMC Remedy Full Text Search license record.
3. Change the Number of Licenses to 0 and click Save.

For more information, see FTS tab configuration options.