Mark Stott
+2
Oct 1, 2021
visibility 7993
star star star star star star
(2 votes)

Setting Up Search & Navigation in .NET 5.0

UPDATE: The documentation has now been updated and can be found here: https://world.optimizely.com/documentation/developer-guides/search-navigation/getting-started/creating-your-project/

Optimizely CMS for .NET 5.0 is a very exciting thing.  Recently the .NET Core Preview documentation was archived and some of that documentation was merged into the live developer guides. Optimizely have a huge amount of developer documentation and it's going to take a while for this content to be updated for .NET 5.0.  Sadly the current documentation for Optimizely Search and Navigation is still focused on the .NET 4.x world

1. Add the EPiServer.Find.CMS nuget package to your .NET 5.0 solution.

2. Generate a new Search and Navigation index at https://find.episerver.com/

3. Configure the index details in app.config...

When you create the index, you will be shown this snippet to add to your web.config:

<configuration>
    <configSections>
        <section
            name="episerver.find" type="EPiServer.Find.Configuration, EPiServer.Find" requirePermission="false"/>
    </configSections>
    <episerver.find
        serviceUrl="https://demo01.find.episerver.net/RXQGZ5QpXU9cuRSN2181hqA77ZFrUq2e/"
        defaultIndex="yourname_indexname"/>
</configuration> 

You will instead add this to appsettings.json like so:

{
    "EPiServer": {
        "Find": {
            "ServiceUrl": "https://demo01.find.episerver.net/RXQGZ5QpXU9cuRSN2181hqA77ZFrUq2e/",
            "DefaultIndex": "yourname_indexname"
        } 
    } 
}

4. Configure your startup.cs to include the find configuration:

public void ConfigureServices(IServiceCollection services)
{
    services.AddCmsAspNetIdentity<ApplicationUser>();
    services.AddMvc();
    services.AddCms();
    services.AddFind();
 }

You should now have everything you need to write your search queries as normal:

var searchResult = _findClient.Search<SitePageData>()
                              .For(request.SearchText)
                              .UsingSynonyms()
                              .ApplyBestBets()
                              .Skip(skip)
                              .Take(pageSize)
                              .GetContentResult();
Oct 01, 2021

Comments

Scott Reed
Scott Reed Oct 1, 2021 04:41 PM

You can also do it in code (if you so wish) such as if you wanted you local 4th index to be in key vault or something

        public static void SetupSearchAndNavigation(this IServiceCollection services)
        {
            services.Configure<EPiServer.Find.FindOptions>(options =>
            {
                options.DefaultIndex = "INDEX";
                options.ServiceUrl = "URL";
            });

            services.AddCms();
            services.AddFind();
        }

Mark Stott
Mark Stott Oct 3, 2021 04:26 PM

Thank you for the suggestion Scott, it certainly provides alternatives, especially if the client is self hosted like a number of our own clients.  With the DXP platform, none of the index or connection string secrets are actually held anywhere near source code; so I'd expect not to apply this in code but by transforms with empty values again.

Scott Reed
Scott Reed Oct 4, 2021 07:53 AM

Yes that's why I was mentioned the 4th index which is outside of the DXP and usually used for local development or a test server. The startup.cs file as it support querying is local development can give us options for complex configuration options should be need to use them.

Antti Alasvuo
Antti Alasvuo Oct 5, 2021 03:13 PM

For future reference, the configuration of CMS 12+ version and Find, is hidden on this page: https://world.optimizely.com/documentation/developer-guides/search-navigation/getting-started/creating-your-project/ and scroll down to title "Configuring Search & Navigation for the website" (at least at the moment ;)).

Mark Stott
Mark Stott Oct 5, 2021 03:56 PM

Thank you for the update Anttl, at the time of writing that page was still only showing the .NET 4.8 CMS 11 version of the guidance :)

Deepmala S
Deepmala S Mar 9, 2023 10:02 AM

Thanks for this blog, I was finding this solution and it's really helpful and working too properly.

Mark Stott
Mark Stott Mar 9, 2023 11:56 AM

Thank you, I'm glad this has proved helpful after all this time :)

error Please login to comment.
Latest blogs
New addon puts the optimization GUI for Optimizely Graph back in the CMS

I wanted the Graph UI for Pinned Results and Synonyms inside the CMS, so I created another addon.

Tomas Hensrud Gulla | Sep 1, 2026 |

From CMS Content to AI-Ready Content: A Practical Optimizely CMS 12 Approach

How structured content can help Optimizely CMS editors prepare content for search and AI-powered experiences Introduction The way users discover...

iliyas shaikh | Sep 1, 2026

Serving Heavy Multilingual Content Efficiently with Optimizely SaaS CMS

When building enterprise-grade applications on modern headless stacks, performance is governed by payload efficiency. Optimizely SaaS CMS and...

Vipin Banka | Aug 31, 2026

The Under-Documented Optimizely Caching API I Somehow Missed

I recently discovered some useful, but poorly documented, caching features in Optimizely CMS. Here’s how ReadThrough, ReadStrategy.Wait and master...

Dom Reilly | Aug 31, 2026 |