Search Index Functionality Effectively Duplicates Content Vi - Sitefinity - Front- & Back-End Development

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Posted by Community Admin on 20-Mar-2013 00:00

Hello & thanks for your time. I'm a UI designer fairly new to C#, ASP.NET and SiteFinity. I am working with version 5.4.4010.0. Overall I am impressed with the system design, as it lends itself well to structuring content as data models separate from presentation and thus is very promising for publishing across different media types.

I am experimenting with the search engine functionality, and have succeeded in creating a specific search engine. I like this ability to target specific search content in the index, plus the speed with which results are returned.

However, the way the system accomplishes all of this effectively duplicates content. If I'm not mistaken SiteFinity's search index creation requires that you create a standalone page as a "dump" of all data in the target content type. That page is what the index is generated from.

I understand why indexing is necessary, but in practice what happens is that the search results click each through to a novel dynamic view of the indexed content's data vs. its original context. For a very simple content search index this is something I can live with, but for an index of >1 disparate content types (blogs, videos, custom, etc.) you wind up with a one-size-fits-all search result destination page in which the content is duplicated and formatted nothing like its original context, with a separate URL.

Why can indexes not be generated directly from the existing content views, and cut out the middle man? Any explanation or assistance is appreciated. (Since I do not yet have a handle on ASP.NET development please be gentle.) Thanks!

Posted by Community Admin on 23-Mar-2013 00:00

Hi Luke,

The default page that is requested when creating a search index is the page you have set up to display the content. This is so that when the user clicks on the item in the search results list the item will redirect to that page which has the proper widget for displaying it. It is not a dump page for creating the index.

For example, if you have News and Blogs, you have a page to display News and one to display Blog Posts. If you then create a search index for News and Blogs, you point it to the News page for News and the Blogs page for Blogs. This is simply the landing page for that content. You do not need to create a new page just for the index.

I hope this clears things up for you.

All the best,
Randy Hodge
the Telerik team

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Posted by Community Admin on 25-Mar-2013 00:00

[quote]Randy Hodge said:Hi Luke,

The default page that is requested when creating a search index is the page you have set up to display the content. This is so that when the user clicks on the item in the search results list the item will redirect to that page which has the proper widget for displaying it. It is not a dump page for creating the index.

For example, if you have News and Blogs, you have a page to display News and one to display Blog Posts. If you then create a search index for News and Blogs, you point it to the News page for News and the Blogs page for Blogs. This is simply the landing page for that content. You do not need to create a new page just for the index.

[/quote]

Hi Randy, thank you for the response.

It is starting to make a little more sense but I'm still getting 404s from search results when I try to index posts from different content categories.

Explanation: the search index I created targets a specific blog. We want to provide users with a simple way to search across all posts within it. The posts within that blog are categorized each into one of a dozen different content categories.

On the front end, these posts are not displayed in conventional blog archive format (i.e., post titles & excerpts from all categories, ordered by date descending) but rather are accessed from custom landing pages, each with a group widgets that list the N most recent entries from date X from respective categories A, B and C etc.

My goal is to search across all post categories in that blog, but I don't have a front end page that displays posts from all of its categories, and thus if I point the index to some parent page upstream of the posts-by-category pages, my search results all click through to 404 errors.

As I just mentioned each category does have a front end page with a more conventional archive list of posts in paginated list format (posts-by-category style), and I've discovered that if I point the search index to one of those front end pages it seems to behave predictably from start to finish.

My problem is that I want one search to parse all categories, rather than construct a dozen different search indexes and corresponding experiences (one for each category.)

Do I need to build a front end page that feeds from all categories, or is there a simpler solution I'm missing?

Appreciate the insight!

Posted by Community Admin on 27-Mar-2013 00:00

Hi Luke,

Yes, I'm afraid you will need to make a single page that can list all categories for the results to point to.

I hope this will work out for you.

Greetings,
Randy Hodge
the Telerik team

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