(This article is for v2010+ of Search for ASP.NET, for v3 please click here)

To use the ASP.NET search engine control without Visual Studio, the first thing to understand is there are two parts to this

1. Getting our DLLs and the search pages on to the server, and

2. Creating the index files which will be placed on the server (the files are version independent).

Part 1.

The files in the attached (see bottom of this page) ZIP have been modified to not include codebehind.  Therefore they can be easily copied to IIS without any accompanying codebehind DLLs.

i) Copy the SearchBasic folder to c:\inetpub\wwwroot.  If you wish to copy to a different location, modify IndexDirectory="c:\inetpub\wwwroot\SearchBasic\IndexDirectory" in "SearchResults.aspx" accordingly.

ii) Copy these DLLs to your bin folder from the Search install folder. 

Keyoti2.Text.LemmaGenerator.dll
Keyoti2.SearchEngine.Core.dll
Keyoti2.SearchEngine.License.dll
Keyoti2.SearchEngine.Web.dll

(For .NET1.1 copy the ‘Keyoti…’ DLLs to your bin folder)

The easiest way is a bin under the wwwroot folder, however you can change this by setting up "SearchBasic" virtual folder as an application in IIS and using a web.config file inside SearchBasic - see http://msdn2.microsoft.com/EN-US/library/kza1yk3a(VS.71).aspx for more info on this.

If you're experienced with the GAC, you can of course use the DLLs direct from the GAC, with no BIN folder, to do this you will need to modify each page's assembly register directive to include the full version of the DLL (see the user guide in help).

iii) The IndexDirectory included in the zip contains the index from our demo project, so you should be able to run searches immediately.  Visit http://localhost/SearchBasic to try.  Of course the URLs given as results will probably fail unless you're running our demos at the same time.

The actual index files are usually created in Visual Studio or the Search Pro Admin Web app., they can also be created programmatically.  You have a few options for doing this.

i) Using the Index Manager Tool. This is a stand alone program allowing you to create and fully manage the index files. The tool is located under the ‘NETCLR_v*_BIN’ folder of the installation directory. Just set the Index Directory Path to the location of the index directory and click Launch Index Manager to start creating your index files.

ii) If you can access Visual Studio (any edition) - follow our Quickstart page (under the product program group in the Windows start menu) on how to do this.

iii) Use the Admin Web App. that comes as part of Search Pro.  The admin web app. is a separate installable application, which can create index files.

iv) In the demo projects folder there is a programmatic example which creates a Windows Form for crawling/building.  Use this Windows Forms application to create the index files (which will be located under the demo folder).

Once the index files have been created, copy them to c:\inetpub\wwwroot\SearchBasic\IndexDirectory, and you should now have fully functioning search.