1. Administration of Categories

Portal Administration module provides access to the categories management under the NEXThink Portal Management section, dashboard Categories.

This widget aims to manage categories in a central point instead of declaring it on each Engine. A category defined in this widget will be synchronized trough all Engines. All these categories will be then available as read-only categories.

1.1. Signing in the Portal

Start the browser, connect to the IP address or name of the Portal and sign in with a central administrator account

1.2. Managing categories

• Select Administration module, NEXThink Portal Management, menu Categories to open the categories management

• The widget displays each category in a row. The 'type' column is useful to distinguish a category based on the Finder definition or based on a CSV file.

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• To Add category, click on one of the two available "add" icons

• To Delete category, first select one or multiple categories and click on the "delete" icon

• To Edit category, click the "edit" icon on the right of the category name to edit.

• To Export category, click the "export" icon on the right of the category name to export. (available only for CSV category)

1.3. Creating categories

There are two ways to define a category:

• Using the Finder definition, you can copy and paste the XML definition from a Finder. All keywords will be declared in each Engine.
• Using a CSV file. This method has been defined to optimize performance, in the file you could define each keyword for each Engine. It means that you can define only relevant keywords for each Engine. Such a category is particularly adapted to define a hierarchy based on it. It permits to have a link Keyword-Engine.

1.3.1. Category from Finder

• Export a category definition from the Finder in the clipboard

• Click on the Add new category from Finder button

• Paste the definition in the input area. You can paste a folder and it will create one entry per category contained in the folder. The name of the category is the name used in the Finder.

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1.3.2. Category using CSV file

This category exclusively applies on objects of type "source".

• Define a CSV file with the following format

  engineName,keyword,auto-tagging rule,type of rule

  • Each line should contain max of 4 columns. <Engine Name>, <Entity Name>, <SubNet>/<IP Address>, <Type of Rule>, <Optional Comment>. Less than 4 columns and more than 5 will give error and will not be able to upload.

  • If a complete line is comment, it should be prefixed with #
  • Portal will ignore lines with only blank fields (only separator are specified eg ";;;")

  • There are 3 types of rule supported: ip, name and dn (distinguish name)

    • ip rules are subnets using notation xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx/yy or individual IP addresses. Overlapping subnets are possible, they are considered by order of declaration (the first one matching wins)

    • name rules are string matching the source name. '?' and '*' could be used to replace one or multiple characters.

    • dn rules are string matching the source distinguish name. '?' and '*' could be used to replace one or multiple characters.

  • The separator can be another character than "," but it must be a single character.

    NEVER EVER USE NOTEPAD.EXE TO EDIT, IF THE FILE IS IN UTF-8 ENCODING

• Click on the Add new category from CSV file button

• Set the category name, select a file to upload, set the separator character, the text qualifier and the encoding.

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• Once a file has been selected, the file is uploaded and parsed to display a preview of the result. Rows with fields containing non-ascii characters or rows with different number of columns than other rows are display in priority but normal rows could also be displayed to complete the preview. The preview will ignore empty rows or rows used as comment.

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  On the right picture you can see that the separator is not correct since columns are not filled for each row. If this case happens, please change the separator. Pay attention to special characters and check that they are correctly displayed. If not, try to change the encoding.
• If the preview correspond to what you expect then you can valid your choice.
• If the category is edited, a confirmation dialog is displayed and contains a summary of the changes. Details of new, modified or removed rows could be obtained by clicking on the info icon. If the category is created then this dialog is not displayed and the category is directly sent.

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• The details will display the row concerning to the state (new, modified or removed) you clicked before. Comments are not displayed.

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• If it corresponds to the expected result then you can click on OK and valid the edition of the category

1.4. Limitations

Actually only one category defined by CSV is allowed and in this file only one category can appear.

In edition, the name of categories (Finder or CSV) cannot be renamed. If you want to change the name, you have to delete the category and create a new one with the desired name, but deleting a category can have a massive impact on the whole Portal; so if possible, avoid it.