Introduction

Auto complete provides suggestions when you type in the following text fields:

• quick search (on the home page and the header of all pages)
• attributes on the advanced search (including search builder)
• attributes on the asset add/edit page and variants of it (e.g. bulk update)

Security and Performance Considerations

Auto complete does not check the visibility of attributes when deciding which completions to show a user. This means that the data shown to users as auto complete suggestions could be data that would otherwise be invisible to them. For this reason it is recommended that you disable autocomplete if your Asset Bank contains highly sensitive data.

If users are given a lot of completions that don't have any search results the completions could be coming from text in document assets that are not visible to them. Setting auto-complete-include-file-keywords to false in ApplicationSettings.properties may help (you need to rebuild the auto complete index after changing this setting).

Rebuilding the auto complete index can take a very long time if your Asset Bank has a lot of assets and/or attributes, so we do not recommend enabling auto complete if your Asset Bank is very large. Disabling auto complete based on text in documents can also improve performance (you can do this by changing auto-complete-include-file-keywords to false in  ApplicationSetting.Properties).

Common Configuration Scenario for Large Asset Banks

If your Asset Bank is too large to have auto complete configured for every attribute then you could still use it for controlled keywords, free entry keyword fields or other attributes. This gives the benefit of auto complete to uploaders, making it quick for them to enter keywords for new assets from an existing list.

The settings for this option in the ApplicationSettings.properties file for example, would be:

auto-complete-enabled=true

auto-complete-quick-search-enabled=false

auto-complete-max-results=15

auto-complete-include-file-keywords=false

Then you would activate it by editing the relevant attribute (admin > attributes > [edit]), ticking 'Auto complete' and running a re-index of the auto complete index.

Enabling or Disabling Auto Complete

Auto complete is completely disabled if the auto-complete-enabled property in ApplicationSettings.properties is set to false. If you want to use any this setting must be enabled. If you enable auto complete after assets have been added to your Asset Bank (i.e. not when you are initially setting it up) then you will need to rebuild the auto complete index.

Data for all attributes that have "Include in keyword searches" enabled will be included in the suggestions for quick search.

Auto completion is enabled on the advanced search and asset edit pages for the individual attributes that have "Auto complete" turned on the "Edit Attribute" page. The suggestions are based on the values of the attribute for existing attributes, except for keyword picker attributes where the suggestions are based on the keywords in the master list. See below.

Indexing

The auto complete index is separate from the main search index. Like the search index the auto complete index is usually updated by Asset Bank automatically but there are some circumstances in which it is necessary to rebuild the index.

You can rebuild the auto complete index by going to Admin > Attributes > reindex the auto complete index.

The auto complete index needs to be rebuilt when:

• You change auto-complete-enabled to true in ApplicationSettings.properties.
• You edit an attribute and enable or disable "Include in keyword searches" or "Auto complete".
• You rebuild the main search index (you should rebuild the auto complete index after the main index because the main index is used when building the auto complete index).
• You change include-category-names-in-keyword-search in ApplicationSettings.properties.