Features

Features of the Publish to Azure Search publisher include:

• Customizable Azure Search feed by editing the Groovy script.
• Connector-independent.
• Runs from any machine with access to the Azure Search Cloud Service.

Limitations

The publisher is subject to the following Azure Search Service limitations.

• Index schema - Certain properties of your index schema can be set only once.
  • They cannot be updated in the future. Therefore, any schema updates that require re-indexing (such as changing field types) are not currently possible after the initial configuration. 
    Important:  Make sure your index has all the required fields with the correct configuration before saving it.
    
    
• Document keys - can only include, digits, underscores (_), dashes (-), or equal (=) signs.
• Document field names - must start with a letter and contain only letters, digits, or underscores.
  
  
• Batch size - the maximum is 16 MB. You can pass a batch of multiple documents to the Index API all at once, so the size limit per document depends on how many documents are in the batch. 
  • If the batch size exceeds 16 MB, the publisher will attempt to split the batch to make multiple requests without exceeding the size limit.
  • If a single document size is 16+ MB, it will not be published successfully to the Azure Index. It is possible to truncate the content of such documents using the Groovy Transformation file.
    
    
• Maximums
  • 1000 documents per batch of index uploads, merges or deletes.
  • 32 fields in the $orderby clause in the schema.
  • 32,766 bytes (32 KB minus 2 bytes) of UTF-8 encoded text for the field size for the Filterable, Sortable, Facetable, and Searchable fields.

More information is available at Service Limits in Azure Search and Create an Azure Search Index Using the Azure Portal.

Prerequisites 

API Key

To access Publish to Azure Search, an API Key from the Azure Search Service must be provided.

To obtain the API Key:

1. 1. Select the Keys option from the Azure Service instance menu on the Microsoft Azure portal.

Environment 

Before using the Azure Search publisher, the index needs to exist with the required schema (containing all fields).

Windows or Linux

The Azure Search Publisher runs on either Windows or Linux.