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Welcome back to the Getting Started with Oracle Endeca Information Discovery v3.0 screencast series.
This screencast will show you how to enable record search in an Oracle Endeca Server data domain and configure the Search Box to use it.
The Search Box provides two types of searches: value search and record search.
Simply put, value search finds attribute values and record search finds records.
Value search will appear as type-ahead suggestions as soon as you enter a few letters into the search box.
For example, if I start to search for the word “helmet”, type ahead suggestions will appear for resellers, products, and product subcategories
where helmet appears in the value.
This helps users clarify their search. For example, when I started this search, I intended to look for the product category of “helmets”, but
this search also exposes resellers and subcategories with helmets in the name.
So, I was able to discover something new about the data.
Selecting any of the results from the value search will refine the data by that attribute value as if I had selected it from the Guided Navigation
component directly.
The second type of search, Record Search, will let you filter your data by the occurrence of the search term in one or more
attributes. I can tell that record search is enabled because the search icon is displayed within the Search Box.
If I search for helmet in the default search interface, all of the components update to reflect my search.
For each record in the Data Explorer component, the attribute that matched this search term will be highlighted.
Now that we’ve learned about the two types of searches, let’s learn about configuring the Search Box component.
As a power user, you can review the configuration for this component.
There are a number of Value Search configuration options available.
For example, you can enable or disable type-ahead suggestions, and if enabled, determine the attributes that are available in type-ahead.
In addition, you can see that in the default configuration, the search interface is set to All, so record search is enabled for all attributes.
Let’s create another configuration, and see how that affects the search.
Lets name this one Match Any.
Let’s leave the original configuration as the default.
We are using only one data source for this application, but if there were more than one, we could use this drop-down menu to select the
appropriate one.
The Search Interface limits the end user’s search, and allows you to control record search behavior for groupings of some number of
attributes and ranking strategies.
We have only one search interface – All – currently available to us.
You can load additional search interfaces using Integrator; to learn how, sign up for the ‘Oracle Endeca Information Discovery: Getting Started’
class at Oracle University or reference our documentation.
For Match Mode, let’s select ‘any’. This means that, if a user enters more than one search term, a record is returned if it contains any of the
search terms. In the default configuration, a record is returned only if it returns ALL of the search terms.
And let’s uncheck ‘Search Within by Default’, so you can see the difference.
The Target page is the page we are configuring, so no need to add anything here.
Now that we have 2 configurations saved, let’s go back to our search box.
You’ll notice a dropdown now appears on the left of the search box, and provides both search configurations.
If I search for Blue Touring against the “default” search interface, and click the Search icon, all of the components update to reflect my search.
You’ll see that there are 3296 records that have both Blue and Touring in any of those attributes that belong to the All search interface and also
have been marked as searchable.
Notice that the Search Within box is checked by default.
So if I add another search term, it will search within the current results.
Now let’s do the same search using the other Search Box configuration.
Notice that now we get 10,034 records – since it is matching on any records that have Blue and/or Touring.
And the Breadcrumbs component indicates that the data is refined using the ‘Match Any’ configuration.
Also notice that the ‘Search Within’ checkbox is not checked by default.
We could certainly check it if we wanted to add a search term to search within the current results.
But if we do not, and type in Mitchell, the new search replaces the exiting search, rather than adds to it.
In this screencast, you learned how to add a configuration within Search Box.
The next screencast in the series will learn about Views and how they are used in configuration.