About summaries

Summaries are sets of data that can be retrieved in a single "read" operation; for example, they can be used to present an aggregated search results view.

Summaries are defined in the Index Definition document. Summaries improve the performance of your applications by allowing selected document data to be indexed as a set, so that when a search is carried out, instead of performing multiple read operations, TEXTML Server retrieves a set of document data in a single operation.

The TEXTML Server summaries feature is like an SQL stored procedure, in that it accelerates search performance by consolidating multiple reads and allowing TEXTML Server to re-use resultspace data multiple times instead of recreating it for each request.

For example, IXIASOFT CCMS uses the TEXTML Server summaries feature to group 28 different document properties into a single index definition. When IXIASOFT CCMS users search their docbase, the TEXTML Server summary feature allows the search to return results very quickly and to display them in a results list as shown in the example below. In Figure 1, the data from the summary are Title, Status, Last Mod Time and Id.

Figure: CMS application search results based on a predefined summary