Sheets

Sheets provide the ability to replace default settings on a per domain basis.  Sheets are collections of overrides.  They contain alternative values for object properties that should apply in certain contexts.  The target is specified as an arbitrarily-long property-path, which is a string describing how to access the property starting from a beanName in a BeanFactory.

Sheets allow settings to be overlaid with new values that apply by top level domains (com, net, org, etc), by second-level domains (yahoo.com, archive.org, etc.), by subdomains (crawler.archive.org, tech.groups.yahoo.com, etc.), and leading URI paths (directory.google.com/Top/Computers/, etc.). There is no limit for how long the domain/path prefix which specifies overlays can go; the SURT Prefix syntax is used.

Creating a new sheet involves configuring the crawler-beans.cxml file, which contains the Spring configuration of a job. 

For example, if you have explicit permission to crawl certain domains without the usual polite rate-limiting, then a Sheet can be used to create a less polite crawling policy that is associated with a few such target domains.  The configuration of such a Sheet for the domains example.com and example1.com are shown below. This example allows up to 5 parallel outstanding requests at a time (rather than the default 1), and eliminates any usual pauses between requests

Important note: Unless a target site has given you explicit permission to crawl extra-aggressively, the typical Heritrix defaults, which limit the crawler to no more than one outstanding request at a time, with multiple-second waits between requests, and longer waits when the site is responding more slowly, are the safest course. Less-polite crawling can result in your crawler being blocked entirely by webmasters. Finally, even with permission, be sure your crawler's User-Agent string includes a link to valid crawl-operator contact information so you can be alerted to, and correct, any unintended side-effects.

<!-- SHEETOVERLAYMANAGER: manager of sheets of contextual overlays
Autowired to include any SheetForSurtPrefix or
SheetForDecideRuled beans -->
<bean id="sheetOverlaysManager" autowire="byType"
class="org.archive.crawler.spring.SheetOverlaysManager">
</bean>


<bean class='org.archive.crawler.spring.SurtPrefixesSheetAssociation'>
<property name='surtPrefixes'>
<list>
<value>
http://(com,example,www,)/
</value>
<value>
http://(com,example1,www,)/
</value>
</list>
</property>
<property name='targetSheetNames'>
<list>
<value>lessPolite</value>
</list>
</property>
</bean>


<bean id='lessPolite' class='org.archive.spring.Sheet'>
<property name='map'>
<map>
<entry key='disposition.delayFactor' value='0.0'/>
<entry key='disposition.maxDelayMs' value='0'/>
<entry key='disposition.minDelayMs' value='0'/>
<entry key='queueAssignmentPolicy.parallelQueues' value='5'/>
</map>
</property>
</bean>

The Sheet named lessPolite in the example defines overlays for various politeness properties.  The Sheet is associated with domains by adding a org.archive.crawler.spring.SurtPrefixesSheetAssociation bean.  This bean contains the domains for which the overlays will be applied.

The performance penalty for using overlays is minor, as extra steps early in URI processing decorate the URI with all applicable overlays at once.