OpenSearch is an XML based collection of technologies that allows publishing the search results of search engines and web sites in a standardized format that can easily be consumed by appropriate search engines and clients. As described earlier SAP Enterprise Search 7.0 offers as of SP3 an OpenSearch interface that lets you use results from Enterprise Search within an OpenSearch Client such as Internet Explorer as described or within another search server as described in my article Federated Search between SAP NetWeaver Enterprise Search and Microsoft Search Server 2008 Using Open.... SAP NetWeaver Enterprise Search could however not act as an OpenSearch Client itself so far. For a federated search scenario SAP NetWeaver Enterprise Search 7.0 instead offers a SOAP Web Services based interface rather than an Open Search interface. This SOAP based interface has some limitations.
The Web Service has to be based on SOAP and in addition has to offer a simple structure. There are only a very limited number of repositories that can be consumed out of the box using this Web Services interface. Since OpenSearch has evolved as the method of choice to achieve ad hoc federated search scenarios SAP plans to offer an OpenSearch interface allowing the consumption of OpenSearch compatible sources with the next major release of SAP NetWeaver Enterprise Search. But what about the current release of SAP NetWeaver Enterprise Search?
We therefore thought about a solution that would allow the instantaneously consumption of OpenSearch sources with the current release of SAP Enterprise Search and came up with the idea of an OpenSearch adapter for the existing Web Services interface of SAP NetWeaver Enterprise Search 7.0. The OpenSearch adapter has been implemented as a J2EE application. It provides a Web Service that can be consumed out of the box using the existing Web Service interface of SAP NetWeaver Enterprise Search. This Web Service when being called by a Web Search Object Connector of SAP NetWeaver Enterprise Search will in turn perform an OpenSearch search request using the same search string that has been entered in the Search UI of SAP NetWeaver Enterprise Search. As a result it is possible to consume an OpenSearch compatible source out of the box using the new adapter and the existing Web Service interface.
The adapter will be made for customers on request. If you are interested please get in touch with me.
Please note that the adapter is not part of the SAP standard software delivery but provided as is.
