Preparing Collections for Activity Collection

This section of the Application Builder Tutorial describes how to configure collection to collect activity information.

1. In your Watson Explorer Engine administration tool, navigate to your example-metadata search collection and click the Configuration tab.
2. In your search collection configuration page, click the Converting subtab.
3. Click the Add a new converter button. A window displays a list of converters that you can add to your search collection.
4. From the list of converters, select Activity feed. Click Add.
5. In the Always retrieve and Return diffs fields, configure the type of data fields that you want to return as part of an activity feed. For the purposes of this tutorial, add the following to the Always retrieve field:

     title
     year
     genre
     hero
     author
     publisher

   To specify the fields to collect old and new values, in the Return diffs field, add the following fields:

   
     year
     genre
         

   Click OK. You have added and configured the activity feed converter to your search collection.
6. Next, navigate back to your seed configuration page and in the Global Settings configuration section, click Edit.
7. Expand the Advanced section.
8. Scroll to the Activity feed setting. From the list of options, select All.
   Note: All configures your search collection to return all changes to the information it contains. Alternatively, you can configure your activity feed to return only URLs instead of the data that was actually changed, which could be a performance consideration when dealing with large collections. For purposes of this tutorial, All enables your users to see any new data that was added, modified, or removed in the example-metadata search collection.
9. Click OK.
10. On the Overview tab, resume indexing and click refresh to recrawl your collection.

    At this point, you have configured your collection to monitor activities. Next, you will change data in one of the sample files in the example-metadata collection, recrawl the collection, and query the activity feed to confirm that it is configured correctly.

    As an example, suppose that you just learned from one of your literary agents that the book Tow Truck Tales was incorrectly categorized as Non-Fiction. Moreover, you were informed that the book was republished as a work of fiction in 2012. You want to update the file with the correct information and share that update with the users of your application.

11. In a text editor, open the tow_truck_tales.html file in your search collection, which is located in the examples/data/metadata-example/ subdirectory of your Watson Explorer Engine installation. In the second row of the HTML table in this file, change the Genre field value to Fiction and Year field value to 2012. Save the file and close it.
12. Navigate to the Overview tab of the example-metadata search collection. Click refresh to recrawl your data.