Using and extending OpenCms search capabilities

 Click here to download (0,3 MB)

Abstract

Many web sites and applications benefits from a good search function. OpenCms uses the highly acclaimed Lucene full-text search engine and thus provides a solid foundation for full-text searches. Especially in conjunction with structured contents the full-text search engine opens new possibilities. As of OpenCms 7, it is now easier to deal with application specific indexing. If even more specific indexing is needed, customized indexing classes can be plugged into the OpenCms framework. Finally, if  one need to be able present a search feature against several web applications and not just OpenCms, this can be achieved by means of integrating OpenCms with an external search engine, while still maintaining the advantage of contents-aware indexing.

In this session we will look at how to configure the built-in indexing in order to take advantage specific information stored in OpenCms' structured contents.
We will look at an example of how to use a custom-build indexing class to cater for the cases where the standard configuration possibilities does not cover the required functionality. The example also shows how the specific information stored in the index can be used as basis for advanced searches.
We will also look at the scenario where there is a need to be able to search in not "just" files in OpenCms' virtual file system, we do this by using the Solr Lucene front-end (Solr is an open source project that provides a web service like front-end to Lucene).

The session should give you an idea of how to meet various needs for searching in relation to OpenCms. Some basic understanding on how OpenCms deals with indexing and searching will be advantageous but not an requirement. The same applies to understanding the OpenCms Java API and XML schemas.