Associating Security Trimmers with Documents in an Enterprise Search System

A computer storage medium having computer-executable instructions stored thereon that, when executed by a computer, cause the computer to:

• maintain a search index storing one or more document identifiers, each document identifier corresponding to a document stored at a back-end computing system and being associated with a crawl rule;
• associate each crawl rule with one or more security trimmers, each of the security trimmers comprising executable code for invoking an application programming interface exposed by the back-end computing system to determine access rights for a document;
• perform a query of the search index to obtain search results including one or more document identifiers;
• and
• for each document identifier in the search results,
• identify one or more associated crawl rules and one or more associated security trimmers, and
• execute the one or more associated security trimmers to determine access rights for the document corresponding to the document identifier.

A method for associating security trimmers with documents, the method comprising:

• maintaining a search index storing one or more document identifiers, each of the document identifiers referencing a document and being associated with a crawl rule identifier;
• maintaining a security trimmer configuration store comprising one or more security trimmer identifiers, each of the security trimmer identifiers referencing a security trimmer and having associated configuration information for configuring the security trimmer;
• maintaining a crawl rule definition store comprising one or more crawl rules, each crawl rule being associated with one or more of the security trimmer identifiers;
• receiving a query associated with a user, the query comprising one or more search terms;
• querying the search index to identify one or more documents that match the search terms;
• and
• for each document matching the search terms,
• identifying security trimmers for the document using the associated crawl rule identifier and crawl rule definition store, and
• executing the security trimmers identified to retrieve access rights to determine if the user is authorized to view the document.