Application-dedicated Search

[vmassol]

What’s our best practice re providing contrib application search (e.g. search for FAQ entries)?

ATM the FAQ app has a dedicated search but it could be better to move that out of the page content (I remember @evalica mentioning that in the past, probably from a UX POV). The idea being to remove custom UI in apps and use the default XWiki UI and focus page content to contain … content.

The best practice could be to provide a dedicated Search Facet + Search Suggest source.

However, there are 2 limitations I can think of:

• It’s possible to have several FAQ apps in the same wiki (see https://extensions.xwiki.org/xwiki/bin/view/Extension/FAQ%20Application#HCreatemultipleFAQs) and ideally the search should only return results from the FAQ app in which you’re searching (as it’s the case with the custom search UI)
• FAQ-related results will appear whenever a user search for any content (even when he/she’s not searching for FAQ data)

WDYT? Any other idea?

Thx

[vmassol]

@vmassol

FAQ-related results will appear whenever a user search for any content (even when he/she’s not searching for FAQ data)

Actually this is true even now since FAQ entry pages from all FAQs are indexed.

So the only issue is being able to filter out search results to list only FAQ entries from a specific FAQ. For the generic search page, we could imagine a FAQ Facet that would lists all the FAQ apps installed and allowing the user the filter on each.

For the search suggest, it’s harder but we could imagine a Search suggest source per FAQ app installed, each FAQ app providing a Search suggest source.

WDYT?

@tkrieck Would be good to have your POV too. Thx!

[tkrieck]

I agree with the basic premise of a single point of search (outside the extension). It is expected that the main search works for all the content of the website. But when users search through the extension (and they are not always aware that that’s the case) this behavior would not be true.

Regarding the Search Suggest, can we prioritize the FAQ source when the page has a FAQ app/extension?

[vmassol]

Note that this proposal is related to Restyling of app actions (AWM) ie about removing app actions inside the page content.