Search for FirstSpirit

Search functions on today's content-driven websites need to do more than conventional full text search. There is a strong demand to enrich the search index content with additional metadata from editorial or structured sources to enable functions such as faceting, sorting by geographical distance or search-based dynamic teasers with contextual content.

In order to map these requirements, Intentive has developed a generic search integration based on FirstSpirit’s UX-Bridge. Apache Solr, the leading technology for full text search in WCM projects, is used as the search engine. Components needed for implementing the following search functions at the front end of online projects are also provided.

Features for your website

  • Full text and individual metadata indexing
  • Faceted search results
  • Individual search result layouts
  • Search term highlighting
  • "Did you mean...?" function
  • Auto complete
  • Synonym search
  • Search term boosting
  • Multiple languages
  • Geographical search

Advantages

  • Real-time transmission of full text and metadata of published content from FirstSpirit into the Solr search index without additional editorial effort
  • Easy integration in your website using a REST interface and the included AngularJS sample implementation
  • Easy, version-independent project implementation using the FirstSpirit standard interfaces (UX-Bridge)
  • Dynamic schema are supported, enabling the easy registration of individual search fields in order to map their special requirements
  • Compatible with FirstSpirit Version 5 onwards and Apache Solr 4 and 5+

Architecture

Dataflow 1: Deployment of Webcotnent from FirstSpirit; 2: Metadata to Document (Facettes, Filter-Attributes, Teaser-Data and more) Possible Instructions: Import/Update & Delete; 3: Repository-Adapter & Indexing (Creation of structured Solr-Import Data); 4: HTTP-Request for filtered construction of the full-text search basis; 5: Execute Solr-Import, Update & Delete-Instructions

Implementation

The module can be implemented with minimum effort into new as well as into existing FirstSpirit projects. The package is supplied with pre-configured components, to reduce installation effort to a minimum. Filling the search index requires only minor adjustments within the FirstSpirit project; integration in the website can be carried out using the supplied AngularJS components, which simply have to be adapted in terms of their configuration.