The CAE Feeder is a web application, which enables search functionality not only for single CoreMedia documents, as the Content Feeder does, but for content beans, where data may be computed from multiple source documents. To do so, the CAE Feeder sends the content bean's data to the Search Engine, which adds it to the index.
The process of sending data to the Search Engine is called feeding the Search Engine. A piece of data used to add a new or update an existing index document is called a feedable. For efficiency reasons, the CAE Feeder sends batches of multiple feedables to add or update index documents and batches of multiple identifiers to remove index documents.
The CAE Feeder can share the content bean code with an existing CAE web application. The CAE Feeder proactively sends data to the Search Engine after new content beans were added, changed or removed. It keeps the index up-to-date after changes in the data of the underlying content beans. Furthermore, it keeps track of the current feeding state to continue seamlessly after restarts of the application. To this end, it stores its state in a database.
The following figure shows the overall architecture:
If you do not want to have updates automatically send to the search engine after content changes, but control yourself when data is sent to the search engine, then you can use the API of the CAE Feeder and develop a custom application as described in Section 5.6, “CAE Feeder for API Use”.
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