Use Azure DevOps as a Content Source

SearchUnify can crawl and index Work Items on Projects in Azure DevOps. This article walks you through the process of installing Azure DevOps as a content source.

PREREQUISITES.

  • To establish a connection between Azure DevOps and SearchUnify, an admin needs a Personal Access Token. The process of generating it has been described in Generate Personal Access Token in Azure DevOps.

  • You should have read access to the projects to be crawled.

Establish a Connection

  1. Navigate to Content Sources.

  2. Click Add New Content Source.

  1. Find the content source through the search box and click Add.
  2. Give your content source a Name.

  3. Enter the web address of your Azure devops account in Organization URL. For example, https://dev.azure.com/test123

  4. Enter your Personal Access Token (PAT) and click Connect. NOTE. Personal Access Tokens are temporary. Their maximum lifespan is one year. Then they have to be regenerated and content source has to be authenticated (or connected) again.

Set Up Crawl Frequency

The first crawl is always manual and is performed after configuring the content source. For now, keep the frequency to its default value Never and click Set and move to the next section.

Azure DevOps crawling is quick and efficient because the down time during crawling is nonexistent. Each time the SearchUnify crawler runs it adds to index the Work Items that have been changed since the last crawl or are new. Works items deleted from Azure DevOps are removed from the index and cannot be searched 15 days after deletion.

Select Fields and Projects for Indexing

Each Work Item has properties, such as an ID or the Team Project it is linked with. These properties are together called meta data and stored in the content type, azuredevops. Admins can specify which properties (content fields) are to be crawled and indexed on the screen By Content Type. The second screen, By Rules, enables Admins to select the projects whose Work Items are crawled. The next diagram summarizes.

  1. Click to view azuredevops properties.

  2. A dialog will open where you can click to remove a content field. The removed content fields are not indexed. To find a field that is not listed, use the Name column. To find standard fields, look up the field name and for custom fields append the field name with custom. Here's an example: custom.<filename>. Labels and Types are assigned to each field, but admins can choose to change the default labels and types. To edit existing content fields, click . Once the configurations are complete, click Save.

  3. Navigate to By Projects and use the alphabetical index to find your Azure projects. A project named ‘Test Grazitti’ will be found by clicking the letter T, a project named Sirius by clicking the letter S, and so on. 0-9 lists all the websites that either start with a digit or with a non-ASCII Latin character. Both 6-dimensional and éducation-de-nos-amis will be listed under 0-9.

  4. Use the checkboxes in the Enable column to set projects for indexing. Once you have checked all the projects, click Save.NOTE. All the Work Items will be crawled if no project is selected.

After the First Crawl

Return to the Content Sources screen and click in Actions. The number of indexed documents is updated after the crawl is complete. You can view crawl progress in in Actions. Documentation on crawl progress is in View Crawl Logs.

NOTE 1

Review the settings in Rules if there is no progress in Crawl Logs.

NOTE 2

For Mamba '22 and newer instances, search isn't impacted during a crawl. However, in older instances, some documents remain inaccessible while a crawl is going on.

Once the first crawl is complete, click in Actions open the content source for editing, and set a crawl frequency.

  1. In Choose a Date, click to fire up a calendar and select a date. Only the data after the selected date is indexed.

  2. Use the Frequency dropdown to select how often SearchUnify should index the data. For illustration, the frequency has been set to Weekly and Tuesday has been chosen as the crawling day. Whenever the Frequency is other than Never, a third dropdown appears where you can specify the interval. Also, whenever Frequency is set to Hourly, then manual crawls are disabled.

  3. Click Set to save crawl frequency settings. On clicking Set, you are taken to the Rules tab.

IMPORTANT.

Either your Azure DevOps account has no Work Items or the content source wasn't successfully set up if the number of Total Documents remains zero.

Data Deletion and SU Index

All the data deleted from Azure is removed from the SearchUnify index within 1 hour.

Manage Conditions

If the first crawl was successful, then you can return to Rules and configure Manage Conditions which has been documented in Manage Conditions in Azure Content Source. Configuring it entirely optional.

Last updatedTuesday, March 5, 2024Or, send us your review at help-feedback@searchunify.com