Website Search Configuration 

Hint

See the Search Index documentation to get a more high-level understanding of the search index concept in the Oro application.

Bundle Configuration 

The system configuration of the website search bundle consists of the following options:

  • engine (string, default value is orm) - name of the search engine that should be used in the application;

  • engine_parameters (array, empty by default) - additional parameters that are required to configure the engine. The default ORM engine does not require any parameters as it shared the database with the Oro application.

  • indexer_batch_size (integer, 100 by default, from 1 to 100) - a number of entities that are indexing batch by batch. The smaller the number, the less memory is used. However, a bigger number is more effective during indexation. It is recommended to use a small number when you have a large memory consumption issue.

Here is an example of configuration that should be put to config.yml to enable custom search engine:

oro_website_search:
    indexer_batch_size: 50
    engine: 'custom'
    engine_parameters:
        host: '127.0.0.1'
        port: 9999
        login: 'username'
        password: '12345'

Please, remember, that format of parameters might be different for different search engines, so implementation of each engine has to parse this section and extract required parameters manually (e.g., using DI compiler pass).

Mapping Configuration 

To add an entity to a search engine, provide the following information in system configuration:

  • entity alias - it is used in search engine queries to specify which entities have to be selected from the index.

  • a list of entity fields that should be included in the search index, with their types. Supported types are text, integer, decimal and datetime. This configuration is used to define the storage structure for the search index, that is necessary for the search speed optimization. You can specify an optional “fulltext” option to define whether the text field should have a full-text search index.

You can use placeholders in mapping configuration (e.g. LOCALIZTION_ID in the example below). Placeholders are dynamically substituted with the values based on the current environment (e.g., current website, localization, language). Use placeholders to get the identifier of the related entities.

The search query should use placeholders and the search index contains resolved values, i.e. placeholders are already substituted with identifiers.

The mapping configuration must be defined in the Resources/config/oro/website_search.yml in your bundle, or in the app/Resources/<bundleName>/Resources/config/oro/website_search.yml.

Here is an example of mapping configuration for the product bundle:

Oro\Bundle\ProductBundle\Entity\Product:
    alias: oro_product_WEBSITE_ID
    fields:
        -
            name: sku
            type: text
        -
            name: names_LOCALIZATION_ID
            type: text
        -
            name: status
            type: text
            fulltext: false

This example shows configuration for the Oro\Bundle\ProductBundle\Entity\Product entity that uses oro_product_WEBSITE_ID alias. This alias contains WEBSITE_ID placeholder that generates a separate scope in the storage for each website. The real alias that is stored looks like oro_product_1 (for a website with ID=1).

In the field configuration, we’ve defined sku, names_LOCALIZATION_ID and status fields. The sku is a plain text field that is stored for every entity. The names_LOCALIZATION_ID is also a text value, but this value is localized (i.e. differs for every language) and uses LOCALIZATION_ID placeholder to map the localized values in storage (e.g. names_1 for localization[1], and names_2 for localization[2]). The status is a text field, for which the option “fulltext” is specified, indicating that the text field does not have a full-text search index.

Engine Configuration 

WebsiteSearchBundle helps you build and plug in any search engine. The ORM search engine is presented out of the box. It can be used as an example to build other engines. Each engine can have its own configuration, and WebsiteSearchBundle provides an easy way to handle it.

As it already was mentioned, bundle provides two options to configure search engine - engine and engine_parameters. engine_parameters is just an array with no specific format, so any configuration can be passed there - it might include connection credentials, storage configuration, security settings and other engine specific parameters.

Bundle configuration options are converted to DI container parameters - oro_website_search.engine and oro_website_search.engine_parameters respectively. These parameters can be injected into engine service to handle search properly.

To automatically use appropriate engine according to specified bundle configuration all services related to this engine has to be placed in the Resources/config/oro/search_engine/<engine>.yml file in one of the bundles. Note: <engine> is the name of the engine defined by option engine in bundle configuration. By default, the orm engine is used, so Oro application automatically loads Resources/config/oro/search_engine/orm.yml files from all bundles.

The biggest advantage of this approach is transparency - every developer can implement new search engine and easily plug it into the application.