# Connector Framework Server

Connector Framework Server (CFS) processes the information that is retrieved by connectors, and then indexes the information into one or more indexes, such as IDOL Server.

Connectors send information to CFS in the form of documents. A document is a collection of metadata and, usually, an associated source file. The metadata describes the location of the file or record that was retrieved, and other information that was extracted by the connector. For example, a document sent for ingestion by a Web Connector includes the URL of the page and the links that were extracted from the page when it was crawled. The Web Connector provides the downloaded HTML in an associated file so that it can be processed by CFS.

Sometimes a document does not have an associated source file. For example, if you retrieve information from a database using the ODBC Connector, the documents sent for ingestion contain the information extracted by your chosen query, and might not have an associated file. These documents are referred to as having metadata only.

CFS uses KeyView to extract information from the source file. Some source files are container files, such as zip archives, and these are extracted. CFS then uses KeyView to obtain text and file-specific metadata from the file, and adds it to the document. The original source file is discarded before the document is indexed. This allows IDOL to search and categorize documents, and perform other operations, without needing to process the information from a repository in its native format.

CFS provides features to manipulate and enrich documents. For example, you can send media files to an IDOL Media Server and perform tasks such as optical character recognition and face recognition. This adds additional information to the IDOL document, so that when a user queries IDOL the results include relevant images, audio, and video files. CFS also supports the Lua scripting language so that you can write your own tasks and develop custom processing rules.

A single CFS can process information from any number of connectors. For example, a CFS might process files retrieved by a File System Connector, web pages retrieved by a Web Connector, and e-mail messages retrieved by an Exchange Connector. Alternatively, you or an application can send information to CFS directly.

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