Simple search in Sitecore - sitecore

Question

Using Sitecore 8.2 with MVC.
I'm trying to implement the search functionality in a MVC view. (with a textbox and submit button)
There is a folder in the content tree called Books which has a list of items. Each item will have these fields - Title, Author, Price
When user searches for a term, it will be checked for a match with any of the 3 fields of the item and return the results.
This method is not working as it returns null Item.
public PartialViewResult GetSearchBooks(string txtSearch)
{
string index = string.Format("sitecore_{0}_index", Sitecore.Context.Database.Name);
List<SearchResultItem> query;
List<Item> matches = new List<Item>();
using (var context = ContentSearchManager.GetIndex(index).CreateSearchContext())
{
query = context.GetQueryable<SearchResultItem>()
.Where(p => p.Path.StartsWith("/sitecore/content/Book")).ToList();
}
foreach(SearchResultItem sritem in query)
{
Item item = sritem.GetItem(); //item is null here
if(item.Fields["Title"].Value.Contains(txtSearch) ||
item.Fields["Title"].Value.Contains(txtSearch) ||
item.Fields["Title"].Value.Contains(txtSearch))
matches.Add(item);
}
return(matches);
}
Is it the right approach. If not please suggest one.

Answer 1

Paths
Avoid querying the path like this:
context.GetQueryable<SearchResultItem>()
.Where(p => p.Path.StartsWith("/sitecore/content/Book"));
Instead use
context.GetQueryable<SearchResultItem>()
.Where(p => p.Paths.Contains(idOfBookFolderItem));
For more info on why, see http://blog.paulgeorge.co.uk/2015/05/29/sitecore-contentsearch-api-filtering-search-on-folder-path/
Approach
You need to hand the entire query to the search api in one go.
List<SearchResultItem> matches;
using (var context = ContentSearchManager.GetIndex(indexName).CreateSearchContext())
{
var predicate = PredicateBuilder.True<SearchResultItem>();
// must have this (.and)
predicate = predicate.And(p => p.Paths.Contains(bookFolderItem.ID));
// must have this (.and)
predicate = predicate.And(p => p.Name == searchTerm);
matches = context.GetQueryable<SearchResultItem>().Where(predicate).ToList();
}
This returns SearchResultItems not Items. If you need the item, just call GetItem.
Matches[i].GetItem()
Null items
This may indicate that your index is out of sync with the database. Try re-indexing from control panel, or in the case of the web database, REpublish the expected content.
Searching template fields
This just searches against the item name. You're limited to being able to specify the generic fields in SearchResultItem class. If you want to search specific fields on items, you can inherit from SearchResultItem and add those fields.
public class BookSearchResultItem : SearchResultItem
{
[IndexField("Book Title")]
public string BookTitle { get; set; }
[IndexField("Book Author")]
public string BookAuthor { get; set; }
}
You can then pass this into the query and search on those fields
List<BookSearchResultItem> matches;
using (var context = ContentSearchManager.GetIndex(indexName).CreateSearchContext())
{
var predicate = PredicateBuilder.True<BookSearchResultItem>();
// must have this (.and)
predicate = predicate.And(p => p.Paths.Contains(bookFolderItem.ID));
// must have this (.and)
predicate = predicate.And(
PredicateBuilder.False<BookSearchResultItem>() // in any of these fields
.Or(p => p.BookTitle == searchTerm)
.Or(p => p.BookAuthor == searchTerm)
.Or(p => p.Name == searchTerm));
matches = context.GetQueryable<BookSearchResultItem>().Where(predicate).ToList();
}
Searching all 'content'
If you find that having to specify the explicit fields is an unwanted hassle or you are performing searches across different templates with different fields, you can instead use the special computed 'content' field which combines all the text data from an item into one indexed field. So instead of the original query which did this
predicate = predicate.And(p => p.Name == searchTerm);
You can instead do just use
predicate = predicate.And(p => p.Content == searchTerm);
Which will find results where the searchterm exists in any field on the item.

Answer 2

First, did you check "query" contains any result?
I would suggest performing the following search query:
query = context.GetQueryable<SearchResultItem>()
.Where(p => p.TemplateId == yourBookItemTemplateID &&
(p.Fields["Title"].Value.Contains(txtSearch) ||
p.Fields["Author"].Value.Contains(txtSearch) ||
p.Fields["Price"].Value.Contains(txtSearch));
return query.Select(x => x.GetItem());

Answer 3

i would not suggest this approach to use. Let me explain why, or what you can do better.
First create your own Sitecore index and do not simply use the default master or web index. If you do that, you can safe the following line of code .Where(p => p.Path.StartsWith("/sitecore/content/Book")).ToList();, cause in a custom index you can simply restrict, what exactly is crawled.
Second you should never access the Sitecore item out of the search results. Reasons for that is the performance. Item item = sritem.GetItem(); You use a search, because its a performant way to access a huge amount of data. When you now access for every result the Sitecore item from the database, you lose your benefit of using a search.
You should simply use the Result Type, in your case the basic SearchResultItem. At the End of your filtering you should call something like var results = query.GetResults(); instead of accessing the items directly.
Here I found a simple example of a sitecore search, with custom index and without accessing the items directly, maybe this helps you.
http://www.mattburkedev.com/sitecore-7-contentsearch-tips/
Now to your problem.
Did you debug the search and looked into the rest of the fields of sritem? Are they all filled? If i remember correctly there is a property which stores the itemId, to retrieve the item with GetItem(). Maybe you could give us the values of the property while trying to retrieve the item.

Answer 4

Sometimes when the index is out of date, the returned search items may no longer exist in your content tree, So rebuild the index and try the search again,
Couple of enhancements that you can apply to your search:
As mentioned in Christian answer you can create index for just your Books tree, which means to set the root of the index to the Books root item.Web index usually used for full site content search.
Instead of getting all books items then go through all items; you can use predicates instead; even after you create the new index use the predicates to get the desired items only.
Also if your site is multilingual add a predicate to filter the required language else you will get multiple versions of the same item.