General search (in different entities)

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Hi all, Our customer is looking for a search function, where several different entities and attributes can be searched. It has to feel like a Google search within your application.  Anyone know if this is possible? We already searched the Mendix app store, but we did not find a lot of promising results.
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For a basic use case, the Lucene appstore module may suffice.

 

At Timeseries, We have encountered this problem as well, and we have built a custom solution for this. Building this all in Mendix is not a great idea, as there are solutions available which provide this capability (‘Google like searching’). Roughly, our solution lets a Mendix application expose the data it wants to be searched. A Java application retrieves this data periodically and ingests it into a search engine. We created a custom widget to query the search engine. If you are interested in this solution, you can send an email to info@timeseries.com

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This can be related to Lucene, but you can implement it using a general interface using the OQL functions or XPath functions from the runtime API. One issue is the representation of what it is that you are searching for.

You can implement a meta representation using your own reflection or the one from the App store. What is displayed on the the page then are these representations, possibly in a heavily styled template grid.

An additional thing to implement is a mechanism taking the user to the actual thing once selected. This can be implemented as a possible runtime configurable entity[s]->page or entitie[s]→ microflow configuration. A lot of work, but well worth it.

If all of this is finished, spend some time looking at Lucene for tagging and indexing everything

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