Capability to search for features in doc by config feature name

[lauracowen]

Reported by @sdaschner: It should be possible to search for Open Liberty features by the ref name used in the config, e.g. mpJwt, or mpJwt-1.1

[lauracowen]

I guess the design question is whether this would be fixed by site search, or whether there should be a filter on the page, or an alternative listing of the features by name, or....

[kinueng]

Hi @lauracowen, Is the feedback asking to have the mpJwt in the table of content rather than MicroProfile JSON Web Token? If we did have mpJwt in the table of content, then it would make it very easy for someone use Ctrl+F the string mpJwt in a browser to find the documentation based on the feature name inside the server.xml.

[lauracowen]

I think the server.xml version of the feature name was left out of the ToC on purpose? cc @NottyCode

[kinueng]

There are some ongoing discussion on this issue.

My quick and dirty fix proposal in https://github.com/OpenLiberty/openliberty.io/issues/803#issuecomment-454570666 would get out of hand. If we were to display both the name Enterprise JavaBeans Persistent Timers and ejbPersistentTimer in the table of content (TOC), the TOC would become a mess to read.

There are ideas being discussed how to allow the filtering based on the server.xml name of a feature and still maintaining the clean look of the current the feature documentation pages.

[cajaygle]

One temp solution could be to display the config feature name as hidden text. I believe if you do a Cmd+F search in the browser it finds hidden text. Users would need to discover they can search for it though -- a temp solution for sure.

[sdaschner]

@cajaygle That helps as temporary solution, yes, on the other hand, if folks don't know that they can search by the feature name they won't likely do it...

OTOH, I think it would help anyway, if we'd display the names like ejbPersistentTimer along the full names. For this example the correlation might be obvious, but there are others where I've wondered what the abbreviations mean. Maybe we can come up with a layout that includes all information, WDYT?

[cajaygle]

@sdaschner we are working on general search capability for the site -- stay tuned! The problem with displaying the feature element name is that it makes for a very cluttered view. The other issue is that the feature element names would not be in alphabetical order, so the user would have a hard time browsing by element name. For example:

CouchDB Integration -- couchdb-1.0 Database Session Persistence -- sessionDatabase-1.0 Distributed Map interface for Dynamic Caching -- distributedMap-1.0

If we had a clear search box where the user could search for either feature name or element name, do you think that would take care of it?

What do you think about adding a toggle switch to allow the user to either view the list by feature names or element names? Would that be useful?

[sdaschner]

:+1: Yes, a search box (that accepts all kind of input) would help a lot! This plus a first entry page with a (nicely readable) list of features would be nice.

I think a toggle is more confusing for users. If we have a search box, then the search capability is nicely solved.

[sdaschner]

Any updates on this?

[lauracowen]

I don't think so yet. For ref, the site search is issue #288

[kinueng]

This is a sub task of https://github.com/OpenLiberty/openliberty.io/issues/1943