Creating a product search
Frankly I'm surprised this hasn't been posted yet but I'm trying to add search functionality to our site that looks only at products. I created the search index (selecting products and defaulting to my search results page), dropped the search text box widget on a page and pointed it to my search results page which contains both the built in search results widget and my own custom widget. My custom widget is what I'll ultimately be using once I verify that it returns the same results as the one out of the box which so far is true. However, I discovered that the only field either results widget seems to use for search is the product title. I don't understand why Telerik has made it so hard to add custom fields to the index but even the built in fields don't work? Seems any usable search would have to include SKU and department at least.
1) Am I doing something wrong or is this working as designed?
2) This thread (http://www.sitefinity.com/devnet/forums/sitefinity-4-x/developing-with-sitefinity/updating-search-index-manually-search-index-fields.aspx) discusses adding custom fields to the search index. However, I don't see where you specify which catelog will use your custom field. If I add a custom field to one product type and I implement the code from that thread, will other searches crash because news doesn't have that field (not to mention other product types)?
3) Are their plans to allow you to mark a field for indexing at the time you create it in the UI? Doesn't this seem intuitive?
I admit to being new to Sitefinity (which I've probably made obvious by this post) so as much detail as you can give related to search and products would be helpful.
Thanks for the post (and the warning), but sadly clients won't always wait for the next release. I would still very much appreciate Telerik posting a product specific solution to adding both the built in and custom fields to the search index. Thanks in advance.
@Marc,
Trust me - in this case you'll want to wait till v5.0