Upgrading from Coveo for Sitecore 4 to 5 - An overview

Coveo for Sitecore 5 is available only with a cloud index. If you’re currently using a Coveo for Sitecore 4.0 or 4.1 On-Premises edition, you’ll need to perform a few steps to move to a Coveo cloud index.

Additionally, the Top Results related folders were only required for On-Premises instances. These should be deleted from the Sitecore content tree to avoid confusion.

Coveo for Sitecore 4 supported two sets of search interface components powered by distinct versions of the Coveo JavaScript Framework, the Coveo for Sitecore Legacy Search UI Framework and the Coveo Hive framework. Coveo for Sitecore 5 packages contain only Coveo Hive framework components and related code.

Coveo Hive search interface components only implement the MVC architectural pattern. Web Forms is no longer used.

Coveo for Sitecore 5 no longer supports the use of LINQ expressions to customize queries sent to the Coveo index. We provide a how-to article on using the Coveo Hive framework instead of LINQ expressions.

The Coveo™ Command Center marks a significant shift in the way you perform Coveo configuration, indexing tasks and in how you navigate through Coveo features within Sitecore. Most notably, the Command Center improves visibility over the index build process and greatly simplifies the selection of fields to index (see About the Command Center).

As mentioned above, the Command Center becomes the recommended means to specify the fields you want to index by handpicking them in a user interface rather than by editing a configuration file, as was the case in Coveo for Sitecore 4.

For more details on including or excluding fields to index using the Command Center and how Coveo for Sitecore 5 handles existing configurations when you upgrade from Coveo for Sitecore 4, see the following documentation sections:

In Coveo for Sitecore 4, field name translation (also known as field hashing) was enabled by default, and this quickly resulted in having countless Coveo fields with confusing names. Coveo for Sitecore 5 reverses this behavior in fresh installs.

Though this reversal in the default field name translation behavior hasn’t been forced upon customers upgrading from Coveo for Sitecore 4, we strongly recommend clients reverse this behavior when upgrading to Coveo for Sitecore 5.

The sys prefix has been removed from the names of these fields and their settings have been moved in the Coveo.SearchProvider.config file.

If you’re using custom result templates referencing sys-prefixed fields, you’ll need to update those references accordingly.