Last Reviewed: May 20, 2008

Article: DTS0173

Applies to: dtSearch 6, 7

Automatically-generated fields

Some document formats contain fields or properties in addition to the document text. For example, Word documents contain a Document Summary area with information such as the Author and Subject of a document.  dtSearch automatically recognizes these fields and indexes them so you can search for text across the whole document or just in a particular field.  These fields are added to the end of the document text during indexing and are displayed at the end of the file when it is opened after a search.  For details on the types of document fields that dtSearch currently recognizes, see "What file formats does dtSearch support?"

In addition to these automatically-detected fields, dtSearch also adds the document filename as a field named "Filename".  This makes it possible to find a document if a word appears in the filename, even if the word does not appear in the document text.

dtSearch Desktop

You can disable these automatically-generated fields in dtSearch Desktop as follows:

To suppress document properties: Click Options > Preferences > Indexing Options, and un-check the Index document properties box.

To suppress the automatically-generated filename field: Click Options > Preferences > Indexing Options, and un-check the Index filenames as text box.

dtSearch Engine

Programmers using the dtSearch Engine developer API can control indexing of metadata using the dtsoFfSkipDocumentProperties and dtsoFfSkipFilenameField flags in the FieldFlags option setting as follows:

(Visual Basic, .NET) Use the Options.FieldFlags property

(C/C++) Use the fieldFlags member of dtsOptions

(Java) Use the fieldFlags member of the Options object

dtSearch Desktop A registry entry can be used to change this in dtSearch Desktop. The key is:
     HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\dtSearch Corp.\dtSearch\Settings\FieldFlags

The dtSearch Engine does not permanently store the FieldFlags value anywhere, so if you set Options.FieldFlags before indexing documents, you will need to set it to the same value before invoking FileConverter to highlight hits.  

To prevent document properties from appearing in documents, but still make them searchable,

1.  Clear the dtsoFfSkipDocumentProperties flag in Options.FieldFlags before indexing documents, and

2.  Set the dtsoFfSkipDocumentProperties flag in Options.FieldFlags before invoking FileConverter to display a document.