Searching Umbraco using Razor and Examine

This post was imported from FARMCode.org which has been discontinued. These posts now exist here as an archive. They may contain broken links and images.

Since Razor is really just c# it’s super simple to run a search in Umbraco using Razor and Examine. In MVC the actual searching should be left up to the controller to give the search results to your view, but in Umbraco 4.6 + , Razor is used as macros which actually ‘do stuff’. Here’s how incredibly simple it is to do a search:

@using Examine;

@* Get the search term from query string *@
@{var searchTerm = Request.QueryString["search"];}

<ul class="search-results">
@foreach (var result in 
    ExamineManager.Instance.Search(searchTerm, true)) {    
    
    <li>
        <span>@result.Score</span>
        <a href="@umbraco.library.NiceUrl(result.Id)">
            @result.Fields["nodeName"]
        </a>        
    </li>    
    
}
</ul>

That’s it! Pretty darn easy.

And for all you sceptics who think there’s too much configuration involved to setup Examine, configuring Examine requires 3 lines of code. Yes its true, 3 lines, that’s it. Here’s the bare minimum setup:

1. Create an indexer under the ExamineIndexProviders section:

<add name="MyIndexer"
      type="UmbracoExamine.UmbracoContentIndexer, UmbracoExamine"/>

2. Create a searcher under the ExamineSearchProviders section:

<add name="MySearcher"
      type="UmbracoExamine.UmbracoExamineSearcher, UmbracoExamine"/>

3. Create an index set under the ExamineLuceneIndexSets config section:

<IndexSet SetName="MyIndexSet" 
    IndexPath="~/App_Data/TEMP/MyIndex" />

This will index all of your data in Umbraco and allow you to search against all of it. If you want to search on specific subsets, you can use the FluentAPI to search and of course if you want to modify your index, there’s much more you can do with the config if you like.

With Examine the sky is the limit, you can have an incredibly simple index and search mechanism up to an incredibly complex index with event handlers, etc… and a very complex search with fuzzy logic, proximity searches, etc… And no matter what flavour you choose it is guaranteed to be VERY fast and doesn’t matter how much data you’re searching against.

I also STRONGLY advise you to use the latest release on CodePlex: http://examine.codeplex.com/releases/view/50781 . There will also be version 1.1 coming out very soon.

Enjoy!

Shazwazza

My blog which is pretty much just all about coding

Searching Umbraco using Razor and Examine