IDOL 24.4
IDOL Getting Started Guide

# IDOL Ingest

IDOL Ingest refers to the tools that allow you to retrieve data from your external repositories, process them, and index them into IDOL.

The ingest process includes:

- Connectors. Each supported repository has a connector, which can use the appropriate repository API to view and extract your data. There is a connector for each repository, rather than file type. For example, the file system connector retrieves data from a file system, and the Web connector retrieves data from web sites, and both connectors retrieve all file types from the repository.

- KeyView. IDOL KeyView processes documents in their native format. It can detect the formats of different files, so that you can route them for appropriate processing. It also extracts text from many file formats, so that you can index the text into IDOL.

- Additional Processing. You can include many additional IDOL processes, such as Eduction, or media analysis, to enrich your data and extract more useful content from different files.

- Workflow Management. IDOL manages the documents going through the system, routes documents to different places according to rules that you can configure, and manages the process of indexing into your IDOL Content component indexes.

IDOL provides two different ways to manage ingestion:

- IDOL NiFi Ingest, based on Apache NiFi, uses a graphical user interface to help you easily set up and configure your ingest chain. Connectors, KeyView, and many additional enrichment and processing components are available as NiFi processors, so you can run your whole ingest process in one place.

- Connector Framework Server (CFS), is an older system based on ACI servers. In this case, the connectors are available as additional ACI servers. KeyView and Eduction are embedded in the CFS component, but you must install additional ACI servers to include other processing, such as media analysis.

## IDOL NiFi Ingest

OpenText recommends that you use IDOL NiFi Ingest to manage your ingest workflow. NiFi is generally faster than CFS, as well as easier to configure and manage, and more extendable.

To use IDOL NiFi Ingest, you install Apache NiFi and the IDOL NiFi Ingest package. You can then use the NiFi user interface on a Web browser to set up a workflow. You can easily create quite complex ingest chains to manage all your different data formats and repositories, and index the resulting documents into IDOL.

You can include as many different IDOL processors as you want to use in your ingest process. Many are available as part of the standard IDOL NiFi ingest installation, and others are available as downloads with the associated IDOL components, which you simply add to your NiFi installation directory.

For a small system, you might only need to install a single IDOL NiFi Ingest instance, For a larger system, or where you need to ensure reliability, you can create a NiFi cluster, with multiple IDOL NiFi Ingest components with the same workflow. You can use this option to:

- provide failover if one of the instances becomes inaccessible.

- improve throughput in large systems, so that you can run the same ingest process on multiple servers, to improve the resources available.

For more information, refer to the NiFi Ingest Help.

## Connector Framework Server

The Connector Framework Server (CFS) is an ACI server, which you configure with a configuration file.

In this case, the connectors are also separate ACI server components, which you must configure separately. Similarly, if you want to use media analysis, you must install Media Server separately.

The number of connectors and CFS components that you need depends on the number of repositories you want to collect data from, and the amount of processing that you want to do. For example:

- To index content from a few small repositories, where the repositories do not change very often, you might set all your connectors up to send content to the same CFS, which indexes into IDOL.

- To index content from repositories that change regularly (generating a large number of new files and updates), or very large repositories, you might use a CFS for each individual connector.

For more information, see Install IDOL, and refer to the Connector Framework Server Help, as well as the Help for the individual connectors.

Copyright 2024 Open Text
Version 24.4 | Last updated September 2024

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Product: IDOL 24.4

Topic Title: IDOL Ingest