Management of Local Synonyms for an In Focus web part

In Atlas 6.0 there are both Global and Local Synonyms that can be set up for your searches. This article is about the Local Synonyms - synonyms only applied when using one specific In Focus web part.

To learn about Global Synonyms available to all In Focus web parts, please see here: Management of Global Synonyms for all In Focus web parts

Behaviour of the Local Synonyms feature

Synonyms are applied for In Focus searches whenever one of the words in your search query matches the one of the configured synonyms. When there is a match, the synonyms are added to the search query behind the scenes.

Local Synonyms are only applicable to the specific In Focus web part you configure them for.

Deprecated In Focus web parts will never recieve this feature. If you are unsure, edit the web part and if you see this message you need to change to use the new In Focus web parts:

If you are unsure how to swap over, please review this article: Swapping legacy In Focus guidance

Configure synonyms for a specific In Focus web part

By default no Local Synonyms are enabled for In Focus web parts. To add Local Synonyms, edit the page containing the In Focus web part, then edit the web part itself and open the Advanced Configurations section. In this section click the Edit synonyms button:

In this screen, by default you will not see any synonyms, but I have added one to aid explanation:

In the Term column, you add your term that you want to provide synonyms for, and in the Synonyms column you provide all the synonyms separated by a comma then a space. Finally, you have the "Two-ways" toggle.

If "two-ways" is turned OFF, synonyms will only be included if the term the user types is the one on the left. So "perspective" will search for "perspective" OR "view" OR "vision", but searching for "view" or "vision" will not include any synonyms.

If "two-ways" is turned ON, all synonyms on the same row will be included whichever term or synonym is typed by the user. So whether the user types "perspective", "view" or "vision", the search will always replace this with "perspective" OR "view" OR "vision".

If you want to add a new line, once you have completed the blank line the + on the right should become clickable and this will add a new line.

Once you have added all synonyms needed for this specific web part, click Save in this panel, then save the page you are working on.

Technical details

As mentioned just above, the way that this feature works is that instead of submitting only the actual text of the user's search query, if synonyms exist for the query text that text is replaced with an OR statement including all the relevant synonyms.

If there are multiple synonyms they will all be included in that OR statement so content will be retrieved which includes any of those terms anywhere in the index. This includes both Local and Global synonyms if both are configured and enabled.

Still have questions?

If you're unsure how you want to set this up please get in touch with the support team.