Table of Contents

Installing screen-scraper™ for Oracle Secure Enterprise Search


Overview

Oracle Secure Enterprise Search can be configured to utilize screen-scraper™ in indexing content for search. This is made possible via the plug-in interface available in Oracle SES, which allows it to invoke screen-scraper™ and handle scraped data to be indexed. In this process, screen-scraper™ runs as a separate service, much like a database server would, and communication is handled over network sockets. The process looks like this:

  1. The Oracle Secure Enterprise Search server connects to screen-scraper™ via an Oracle SES plug-in.
  2. The Oracle SES plug-in connects to screen-scraper™ via a TCP/IP connection, similar to the way an application connects to and interacts with a database.
  3. screen-scraper™ queries various web sites, extracting data.
  4. The extracted data is passed back to Oracle SES as it is scraped, which then indexes it for searching.

Installing screen-scraper™

We're assuming that you already have Oracle Secure Enterprise Search installed and running correctly. If not, please refer to Oracle's documentation. screen-scraper™ is installed as a separate application, and we recommend you install it on the same server on which Oracle SES is running (though it doesn't have to be).

To install screen-scraper™, download the Enterprise Edition, and, depending on your operating system, follow the instructions found on that same download page.

In order for screen-scraper™ to receive scraping requests from Oracle SES in needs to be running in server mode. Be sure to start up screen-scraper™ before attempting to invoke it from Oracle SES.

Installing the Plug-in

The plug-in for screen-scraper™ for Oracle SES is simply a jar file that needs to be copied to a directory where Oracle SES can find it. First, download the ss4ses.jar file and copy it to the "plugins" folder for Oracle SES. The path is likely something like this: "[SES_ROOT]\product\10.2.0\db_1\search\lib\plugins". Second, the ss4ses.jar file relies on a class found in the "screen-scraper.jar" file, so you'll need to copy "screen-scraper.jar" (found in the root folder where you installed screen-scraper) to that same "plugins" folder as well.