How can I update an existing index to reflect changes to my web site?

Sometimes you may make some changes to your web pages and/or add some new pages, and if you have a full-text glimpse index of your web pages, of course you'll want the new text incorporated into your index.

If you have an exceptionally large site, the creation of the index can take some time. To avoid having to wait while the whole index is rebuilt from scratch just to reflect a few small changes, and/or to conserve WebCom system resources, you may only want to refresh the existing index.

To refresh an existing index, simply go to the create index form, just as though you were creating a new index. Instead of "Build Index," select the radio button labeled "Refresh Index". This button will already be selected by default, since the system will detect automatically that you already have an index in that directory.

Please NOTE:

• The refresh option can only add to the index new words and/or new files since you last built the index. It cannot delete words from the index if you've deleted words from files, or deleted entire files. This means that sometimes Glimpse will find a match in the index that doesn't exist. Often (such as when you ask Glimpse to show each matching line in each matching file), Glimpse does not look at the index only but also scans the matching files. In these cases, Glimpse will catch the error and ignore the erroneous information in the index. However, if Glimpse has no reason to scan the file itself, it may assume the index is correct and output an invalid match, even potentially to a non-existent file.

  For this reason, you should only use the refresh option to add new text to an existing index. If you'd like to remove deleted text from the index, you must rebuild the index from scratch.

• Often (especially if your site is small), even though you've asked Glimpse to refresh the existing index, Glimpse will automatically detect that it could just rebuild the entire index from scratch with little or no more work that would be required to refresh the index. In this case, Glimpse ignores your refresh request and rebuilds the index from scratch.