Using Federated Search to display Autonomy results

Our main intranet search engine is Autonomy and our company have spent a great deal of effort and money to get Autonomy to index SharePoint content using the Autonomy SharePoint Connector product.

What they didn't do is think about how we could reverse the scenario and provide autonomy search results within SharePoint. So, my first thought was along the lines of a custom development project but quickly realised it actually takes about 5 minutes to setup using SharePoint Federated Search feature...

Step 1 - Setup the federated search location

1. In Central Admin go to 'Manage Service Applications'
2. Click your 'Search Service' application to take you to the 'Search Administration' page
3. Click 'Federated Locations' on the left menu
4. Click 'New Location'
5. Enter a logical Name like "Autonomy Production", Display Name and Description
6. Author and Version fields are optional
7. Leave the 'Trigger' field set to 'Always' unless you which to only search Autonomy when a certain prefix is added to the search term
8. Expand the 'Location Information' section
9. Select 'OpenSearch 1.0/1.1' in the 'Location Type' field
10. Enter your Autonomy search URL in to the 'Query Template' field including the {searchTerms} parameter e.g. http://autonomy.company.com:9000/a=query&text={searchTerms}&maxresults=10&printfields=DRETITLE,DRETITLEURL
11. Note I have applied a 'maxresults' parameter which you may wish to change. I have also added the 'printfields' to ensure that we return the correct title and title URL field for each result. DO NOT change the value of the 'printfields' parameter unless you are confident at modifying XSLT (which comes later).
12. Enter the same URL as above into the '"More Results" Link Template' field
13. Expand the 'Display Information' section
14. Uncheck the 'Use Default Formatting' checkbox
15. Click inside the top text field labelled 'XSL' and delete the existing content using ctrl+a > Delete
16. Now paste the XSL shown at the bottom of this post into the blank textbox (you might want to paste it into a XML editor first to clear up any pointless whitespace added by the RTE!)
17. Leave the remaining textbox contents as they are
18. Expand the 'Restrictions and Credentials Information' section
19. Leave the 'Restrict Usage' field set to 'No Restrictions' unless you wish to specify a particular search site that is allowed to use this federated location
20. Now select the access credentials relevant to your environment, I use a service account so have selected "NTLM - Specify a username and password" option
21. Now click OK
22. You will be alerted to any fields that you've missed or if the XSL cannot be parsed, but if you end up back at the federated locations list and our new location is listed then we are nearly there!

Step 2 - Test Autonomy results using the Federated Search web part

1. Go to any one of your site collections (or the one specified in the "Restrict Usage" section if appropriate)
2. Create a test page on your site
3. Click the Page tab and select 'Edit' from the ribbon
4. Add a 'Search Box' web part to the page
5. Click 'Edit Web Part' from the web part's context menu
6. Expand the 'Miscellaneous' section and in the 'Target search results page URL' field enter the full URL of the current page (our test page) e.g. /somesite/SitePages/test.aspx
7. Click OK
8. No add a 'Federated Search' web part to the page benath the search box web part
9. Click Edit Web Part from the web part's context menu
10. From the 'Location Properties' drop down list select your 'Autonomy' location
11. Click OK
12. Click Save and Exit to save the test page
13. Now enter a search term into the search box and hit enter
14. You should see your Autonomy results appear in the federated search web part. The results are presented in a very basic text format, if you wish to modify the way the results appear you'll need to change the XSLT

XSL to paste at point 16:

<xsl:stylesheet version="1.0" xmlns:xsl="http://www.w3.org/1999/XSL/Transform" xmlns:autn="http://schemas.autonomy.com/aci/" exclude-result-prefixes="autn">
<xsl:output method="html" />
<xsl:template match="/">
<xsl:apply-templates />
</xsl:template>
<xsl:template match="autnresponse">
<xsl:apply-templates select="responsedata" />
</xsl:template>
<xsl:template match="responsedata">
<table border="0">
<xsl:apply-templates select="autn:hit" />
</table>
</xsl:template>
<xsl:template match="autn:hit">
<xsl:apply-templates select="autn:content" />
</xsl:template>
<xsl:template match="autn:content">
<tr>
<td>
<a>
<xsl:attribute name="href">
<xsl:value-of select="DOCUMENT/AUTONOMY/DRETITLEURL" />
</xsl:attribute>
<xsl:value-of select="DOCUMENT/AUTONOMY/CONTENT_TITLES/DRETITLE" />
</a>
</td>
</tr>
</xsl:template>
</xsl:stylesheet>