You can customize ALI Search in a number of ways. This section summarizes recommended approaches to common customizations, describes their capabilities and limitations, and points to more complete documentation and sample code.
Snapshot Queries can be used to provide advanced search functionality. Snapshot Queries display search results in a portlet, and cache results to avoid burdening ALI Search. For details on Snapshot Queries, see the portal online help.
The banner search box is the text search field that appears at the top of each portal page.
|
|
By default, banner search will query for the text in the name, description, and full-text content of documents, document folders, communities, portlets, users, ALI Collaboration items, and ALI Publisher items. When a user is viewing a community or document folder, banner search also offers an option to restrict the search to the area being viewed. The following pages provide more information on customizing banner search:
Customizing the ALI Search UI: Change the default behavior of banner search to query for different types of objects, add search categorization properties, or add search boxes to the portal page.
Adding Pathways Search: Add an AquaLogic Pathways search box to the portal banner using Adaptive Tags.
Searching External Repositories: Replace portal search with Federated Search.
Creating Search Portlets: Create portlets with search boxes that provide access to banner search functionality.
The advanced search page is used to add search constraints on portal properties. Administrators (but not standard users) can search a much wider set of object types from advanced search, including administrative objects.
 |
The Search for Text field on the advanced search page behaves similarly to banner search, with a few minor differences; advanced search queries are never spell-checked and the thesaurus is not used, because this page is meant to be a more precise interface for expert users. The following pages summarize the most common customizations:
Customizing the ALI Search UI: Change the look of the advanced search page or change the default behavior of the queries run from the advanced search page.
Creating Search Portlets: Create portlets that provide access to advanced search, or replace the advanced search page with a custom search portlet.
The search results page is the portal page that users see after submitting any banner or advanced search. (This page is not used for Federated Search.)
 |
You can customize the appearance of the search results page. There are some limitations because the portal uses this page in a number of ways; the Add Portlets and Join Communities pages are both customized versions of the search results page. The following pages summarize the most common customizations:
Customizing Search Results: Customize the look of the search results page, add properties and other data to the returned search results, or add a "Sort by" entry to the toolbar on the results page.
Improving Relevance Ranking: Improve search results ranking and customize the thesaurus used by ALI Search.
Searching External Repositories: Use ALI Search to search or index content from external sources.
Creating Search Portlets: Create a portlet that displays search results, or upgrade a 4.5/4.5WS portlet that calls IPTCardSearch or IPTFolderSearch.
It is always useful to see what portal users are searching for in the portal, before and after making customizations. For more information, see Tracking Portal Search.
Federated Search provides access to external repositories without adding documents to the portal Knowledge Directory. Federated Search is especially useful for content that is updated frequently or is only accessed by a small number of portal users. For details, see Federated Search Services.
The following tracks and documentation provide more information on search-related topics:
Portal Event Interfaces (PEIs) are extensions that you can add to the portal UI to perform common customizations. Information on search-related PEIs is provided on the pages above. For more details and sample code, see Using Programmable Event Interfaces (PEIs).
The PRC Search API is part of the Programmable Remote Client (PRC) and is a SOAP (Web services) API that runs search queries against the ALI system. This is the friendliest search API that ALI offers, although it is not quite as powerful or as fast as the Portal Server API. For details and sample code, see Extending Server Functionality with Remote APIs : Extending ALI Search Functionality. For details on search parameters, see Knowledge Base article Search Results Page URL Format.
The Portal Server API is the lowest-level public programming interface to the portal. This is the API that is called by the portal UI to create objects, run searches, and so on. It is available in Java and C#, and requires that the portal (Plumtree.dll) be installed on the machine where the code is running. The search portion of this API is called the PTSearch API, and it includes interfaces IPTSearchRequest and IPTSearchResponse. The PTSearch API is less friendly but somewhat more powerful than the PRC Search API. ALI recommends using the PRC Search API when possible, but many UI customizations require the PTSearch API. The PTSearch API is covered on the Creating Search Portlets page.
The Portal UI is the general term for the Java or C# code that renders the portal user interface. The code for the banner search box, advanced search page, and search results page are all parts of the Portal UI. For details on portal UI components, see the Overview of AquaLogic Interaction.
