Architecture of the Archive Browser

To give you instant access to years of historical data without impacting your production environment, the Archive Browser utilizes a decoupled, high-performance architecture. It acts strictly as a viewer and search engine for the ASCII text files that have already been produced by the AE DB Archive utility.

By completely separating the search index from the Automation Engine, this architecture ensures that executing heavy historical searches puts zero computational load on your live database.

The Data Flow

This diagram illustrates the Archive Browser architecture:

A system architecture diagram illustrating an archiving data flow. At the top left, an AE Database points via an arrow labeled ucybdbar to Archive files on disk. A line connects these archive files down into an Archive Browser module, which houses a Lucene Index (depicted by a magnifying glass and database icon). At the bottom, two interface modules—a Web UI (browser) and a REST API (integrations)—have lines with arrows pointing upwards into the Archive Browser, indicating they query or access the indexed archives.

Te Archive Browser follows a straightforward, three-step data flow from your live database to the end-user:

  1. Data Export

    First, the AE DB Archive utility (ucybdbar) extracts the historical data from your live AE database. The utility converts and saves this data as semicolon-delimited ASCII text files into a designated folder on your file system.

  2. Indexing

    The Archive Browser continuously monitors this dedicated file folder. When it detects the exported files, it automatically builds an embedded Apache Lucene full-text search index. This index updates automatically whenever new archive files appear in the directory.

  3. Access

    Finally, the indexed data is made available for querying. You can access the data visually through the Web UI in your browser, or programmatically via the REST API for custom integrations.

Because the index is fully embedded within the Archive Browser, you can filter, sort, and retrieve millions of archived records in milliseconds. No connection to the AE system is required at query time, guaranteeing that your historical audits never slow down your daily automation tasks.

See also: