Search Integration with non-SF websites
I'm trying to integrate our SF website to include search of another site(in our corporation, different section). They don't use SF(they're a java shop). I'm able to conduct a search of their website through the services they exposed by creating an assembly to do the call and get the results, however I don't know how to include these results with what SF is bring back.
Is there any documentation, or even just ideas/suggestions anybody might have to get started.
Hi Chris,
This is quite complicated task. You might find this post useful where I explain how this can be done. Currently there is an issue with the custom pipes (The bug ID is 105418)and it will not allow you to index the external content data.
Regards,
Ivan Dimitrov
the Telerik team
Thanks for the link, I'll take a look.
Is it possible to try and go the opposite way. Build a webpage(in the sf website) that can call the sf search api and get results?
Hi Chris,
Yes, there is API that you can use
var searchManager = SearchManager.GetManager(null);IResultSet result = searchManager.Find(this.IndexCatalogue,searchQuery,skip,take);I think this is what I'm looking for.
Thank's for your help Ivan.
Chris,
Did you get this to work? I'm trying to do something similar for my site. Is this code you can share with me?
Thanks
Joseph,
I haven't tried to implement this approach yet, it was (unexpectedly) pushed to a later date.
I had originally tried screen scraping and was able to make it work. If you try that approach go into the search results widget and update the template to use the simplest possible html for the results. It's not ideal, but it will help.
Chris
Chris, thanks for your prompt response.
Ideally, I would like to leverage the Lucene Search engine built into Sitefinity. The data I'm trying to index is from an external web service. I thought about writing a background process to spider the service and import the data as content, but I'm not sure about this approach.
I might end up having to write a publishing pipe similar to the Facebook/Twitter pipes that is responsible for invoking the web service methods directly from an external library.
Hi Joseph ,
The proper way for this implementation is using a pipe. We are going to have some samples for Q1 with Products module. The issues with custom pipes are sorted in our code base.
Best wishes,
Ivan Dimitrov
the Telerik team