Flax Basic is a simple enterprise search system, designed to allow you to build searchable indexes of files on your PC, intranet or website. It is based on the Flax enterprise search solution platform developed by Lemur Consulting Ltd. and is an open-source application (i.e., the source code is freely downloadable). As such, Flax Basic can be downloaded and installed at no charge on as many computers as required.
Flax Basic builds a high-performance custom database of the documents you choose, and allows you to search them very quickly and accurately. Flax Basic can read documents in Microsoft Office format, web pages in HTML, Adobe Acrobat (PDF) documents and Rich Text Format (RTF) and automatically extract the text. Flax Basic also provides automatic query spelling correction and ranks results in order of relevance.
Unlike other products, Flax Basic does not put a limit on how many documents can be indexed and this is only limited by the amount of disk space and memory available. Flax Basic is controlled via a password-protected web page interface.
Download the Flax Basic package (setup.exe) from http://www.flax.co.uk and copy it to the computer which will host the searchable indexes. This computer will be running Microsoft Windows and should have at least 1GB available memory and enough disk space to hold the Flax database (as a rough guide this will be approximately the same size as the source documents). If possible, the computer should have more memory - the more of the database that can be held in memory, the faster the system will run.
Run the setup.exe file and install it to a suitable location (usually C:\Program Files\Flax Basic). Note that you will also be asked where the Flax Basic data files should be located; make sure there is enough free space on the disk drive you choose.
As part of the installation you will also be asked to set a password. This password controls access to the Administration section of Flax. You will be asked to enter the password twice to confirm it. Note that the password isn't displayed as you type it, even as asterisks.
At the end of the installation process you will be asked whether you want to install Flax Basic as a Windows Service, a program that will run automatically in the background whenever you start Windows. Unless you want to start Flax Basic manually every time the computer is restarted, it is recommended that you install Flax Basic as a Windows Service. If you choose this option the Service is automatically started at the end of the installation process, and Flax Basic is now running in the background.
To see Flax Basic working, start a web browser and enter the following address (if you're reading this guide on the same computer that you installed Flax Basic on, just click the link below):
You should see the main search page. Note that you won't be able to search anything yet as you haven't created any searchable indexes!
If you don't see anything, or get an error, it's possible that Flax is not running. If you decided not to install Flax as a service, you will have to run it manually - select Start, Programs, Flax Basic, Flax Basic (Manual Start). A command box will pop up titled 'Flax Basic' - don't close this box until you have finished running Flax.
To view the Administration system, start a web browser and enter the following address (if you're reading this guide on the same computer, just click the link below):
You will be asked for a username and password - the username should be 'admin' and the password you chose during installation.You should see a page similar to the one shown below:
This page shows an (empty) list of Collections and a link to allow you to create a new Collection. A Collection is a central concept in Flax Basic, and represents a group of files that a user may choose to search. For example, you might create two Collections of 'Sales Documents' and 'Technical Documents', and then allow users to choose whether to search either collection or both at the same time.
Hyperlinks at the top of the page allow you to view the Search and Advanced Search pages (these are also visible to end users) and set various program Options, as well as seeing more information about Flax Basic and the Flax system in general on the About page.
Let's start by creating a Collection of some files you want to be searchable. These files can be of various formats and can be in several different places, and you can either build an index of them immediately or schedule automatic indexing at a regular time (the latter is useful if your files change regularly, for example if you publish news items).
First, let's create a collection called 'MyFiles': Click the link on the page above marked 'Create a new collection'. Now we're going to give it a description and then enter the path to the files we want to use:
The name used for the collection should be relatively short ('Legal', 'Sales', 'New Products') but the description can be longer. Both are shown to the end user so they can choose which collections to search.
You now have to decide which files should be included in this collection, using the 'File Specification' section. In this case we're going to use a path to some example files that are installed with Flax (you may need to modify these paths if you installed Flax somewhere other than the default folder):
Type the following into the 'Path' box:
C:\Program Files\Flax Basic\exampledocs
You can enter any number of pairs of settings for a Path and associated Mapping. The Path is where the 'source' files you want to index are located, and the Mapping controls how an end user will access these source files when they are shown as search results.
You can serve source files directly via Flax Basic by typing 'FLAX' into the Mapping box. This is not likely to be as efficient as a dedicated web server. Also note that Flax will ignore any user access restrictions to files. For these reasons, we advise against using this function for a public web site or in a security-critical application.
If you want to run Flax Basic to allow users to search files shared across a Windows network, you will need to set up an appropriate Mapping. For example, some source files might be held on a networked computer called 'FILEBOX' in a folder 'd:\PublicFiles\LegalStuff', which is set to be shared on the network as 'Legals'. Assuming Flax Basic is running on the machine 'FILEBOX', you would use a Path of 'd:\PublicFiles\LegalStuff' and a mapping of '\\FILEBOX\Legals'.
If you are running a webserver, you should (for security purposes) serve source files via the webserver rather than by Flax Basic. For example, let's say you run a web server (using Microsoft IIS) for a site called 'www.anything.com' and you have some source files that are located in a folder on the webserver computer of 'c:\Inetpub\wwwroot\anypages\'. The web server is set up so that visiting a page such as 'http://www.anything.com/page1.html' will result in the source file at 'c:\Inetpub\wwwroot\anypages\page1.html' being displayed to the end user. In this case, to build a searchable index using Flax Basic, we would use a Path of 'C:\Inetpub\wwwroot\anypages' and a Mapping of 'http://www.anything.com'.
For now, type 'FLAX' into the Mapping box.
You can also click the 'browse' link, which will give you a simple tree view of the folder structure on the machine that is running Flax:
Click the blue triangle icons to open up a tree, and click the name of a folder to select it as the Path for indexing.
The checkboxes below allow you to decide which file formats will be included in the index. Flax Basic will only read those files that you select. If you leave all the boxes unchecked, Flax Basic will assume that you want to index all of the file types shown. Leave them unchecked for now.
The final setting in this section allows you set the age of files in the index; use this to include only the files that were last modified in the period shown. Leave this setting as 'Any age' for now.
There are more settings further down the page; let's leave these settings as they are for now.
Now you have created a searchable index, you can watch the indexing progress. Click 'Apply' to save the collection details and return to the Collection Status page, which should show the new collection:
The Collection Status page shows all the available collections and their indexing status. The status is shown as 'Start' (collection has no scheduled index time, and must be started manually), 'In progress' (collection is being indexed currently) and 'Due' (collection will be indexed as soon as possible as its scheduled time has occurred).
Click the 'Start' button and you should see the collection you just created move quickly to 'In progress'. While this is happening the number of Files found will increase, and a similar number of Documents will be created. You now have a searchable index - congratulations!
The 'Hold' button is used to hold the indexing process for a particular collection; clicking it again restarts indexing. This is useful if there is a problem with a particular collection, or it needs to be removed temporarily from the search results.
Click the 'Search' hyperlink at the top of the page, and type in the word 'contains', then click 'Search'. You will see that this word was found in two of the three documents in the collection. Short 'snippets' of each result are shown, together with a link to the document itself and size and modification date.
Click the 'Advanced search' hyperlink at the top of the page. This gives you a way of refining your search by entering an exact phrase (try 'in the collection'), searching for documents without certain words (try 'geese'), and by restricting which types of file will be searched.
That's it! You've successfully created a searchable index of files with Flax. For more information on Flax please see the Flax website.