Howto:Full-text Search on IP-Phones with ESTOS Metadirectory

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Revision as of 16:30, 1 August 2014 by Sga (talk | contribs) (→‎Solution)
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Summary

This article provides information about implementation of a full-text search on the IP-Phones using ESTOS MetaDirectory.

Applies To

This information applies to

  • ESTOS MetaDirectory 3.5.x
  • innovaphone IP-Phones V10 and older


More Information

Problem Details

This article will explain how to configure the MetaDirectory to enable full-text search on innovaphone IP-Phones using ESTOS MetaDirectory as an external LDAP directory. The configuration is also compatible with myPBX.

In a standard configuration the search on the IP-Phone is performed according the Name Attributes Setting in the External LDAP Server configuration. E.g. if following Name Attributes are configured "sn,givenName,company", the search is performed on the sn (surname), but not on given name or company name at the same time (to search the additional attributes, you would need to specify additional search words separated by space).

Full-Text search means that the entered text is searched not only on the primary Name Attributes but on multiple attributes at the same time. E.g. a Full-Text search for bell for the name attributes "sn,givenName,company" would return all entries having either a surname or givenname or company starting with bell. However it is often wrongly assumed that a full-text search will also deliver all entries not starting with bell but including it at some point, e.g. "Isabelle". As said before, this is not the case.

Solution

The MetaDirectory allows to search on special meta full-text attributes, that are mapped internally on multiple database fields.

One of this meta attributes is searchContact, that is preconfigured to search in multiple fields, like First Name, Last Name, Company etc.:

Howto fulltext search screen 01.png


Unfortunately, the searchContact can not be used by the phone as one of the Name Attributes. We have to create another attribute containing all the necessary information, that must be displayed in the IP-Phone search result. Therefore we have to add an additional field in the Database, that contains the data.

In the replicator on the MetaDirectory we have to add the following field mapping (use Drag-n-Drop from left to right):


Howto fulltext search screen 02.png


This mapping will put data from sn,givenName and company into the field custom0.

The custom0 field (aka User0, in the MetaDirectory) can be formatted for better readability, e.g. surname and givenname separated by a comma (,) and company name prefixed by a minus (-). like following:

Howto fulltext search screen 05.png


The custom0 field should be indexed on the MetaDirectory, in order to deliver the search result as fast as possible (about 15 ms on indexed fields, compared to some seconds to not indexed):

Howto fulltext search screen 04.png


Now we can configure the Name Attributes Setting in the External LDAP Server on the IP-Phone as following:

Howto fulltext search screen 03.png

Note: If you use this solution with myPBX, be sure to leave the H323 field empty(as shown in the screenshot above).

To test the configuration type some letters on the IP-Phone, the search result should contain multiple entries matching on different fields beginning with the same letters (Names, Companies etc.).

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