Specifying content sources

In the Business Data Catalog (BDC), content sources represent content that the search service should crawl, and information about how it should crawl that content.

Before you begin

If you want search results to be security validated before they are shown to users, you must register the security trimmer as described in Registering a security trimmer before creating the content source as described in this topic. If you create the content source before registering the security trimmer, it will not use the security trimmer unless you re-create the content source. In addition, you must also re-crawl the content source to get the search to work. If you updated the BDC application after setting everything up, you must re-create the content source and then re-crawl the contents. If you do not perform this extra step, the content source will point to the incorrect system instance IDs and you might see an error message similar to the following in the diagnostic server logs: Error occurred when executing pluggable security trimmer with Id 1.

To specify a content source and begin a crawl:

1. Open SharePoint Central Administration.
2. In the left pane, click the name of the Shared Services Provider that you want to configure (for example, SharedServices1).
3. In the Search group, click Search settings. The Configure Search Settings page appears.
4. In the Crawl Settings group, click Content sources and crawl schedules. The Manage Content Sources page appears.
5. Click New Content Source. The Add Content Source page appears.
6. Type or Click options or type values using the descriptions in the following table.

7. Click OK to save your changes.

For a library with a large number of documents, the full crawl may take several hours. After the full crawl is completed, searches can be performed.