Introduction
This document
provides an introduction to the search functionality of the EPiServer platform.
The EPiServer search is used by the global search available to users in
OnlineCenter, as well as the templates available for both EPiServer CMS
and EPiServer Relate. The underlying functionality is based on the Lucene search
engine which is part of the EPiServer Framework.
About EPiServer Search
Search in EPiServer features the following:
- Global search across all types of content.
- Static facets - categories and types, possibility to define
which facets you want to filetr on.
- Event driven indexing - iInstead of crawling the entire HTML
content of the site, you push the content you�d like to index to the search
service, which supports good performance.
- Index any type of content - web pages, document files, or
community content.
- External content - The search index can be extended to include
results from external systems using the search web service and an open protocol
based on Atom.
- Access based search result filtering - ensuring that users will
only see content they have access to.
- Search API similar to the Lucene API which is used by the
search service. The search service is pluggable, meaning that you can replace
Lucene with another index and still use the same API for searching on the
client.
- Stemming on English, provides the same support as Lucene.
- Instant search - the most important information is shown as you
type, for example a phone number if you are searching for a colleague on an
intranet.
You can create
and customize search functionality quickly and easily for EPiServer products. A
search solution to help website visitors find what they want can be created by
combining EPiServer Data Source Controls, listing controls and even third party
controls (.NET etc).
SearchDataSource is one of the data source controls shipped
with EPiServer.
Example search functionality using the EPiServer SearchDataSource control is
used in the public templates package. To take a closer look at the example
search functionality install an example site and open the project in Visual
Studio, see the EPiServer CMS installation instructions for further information.
See Also
The search integration for EPiServer CMS, Relate (Community) and Commerce are described in more detail in their respective SDK under the Developer Guide "Search"
section.
