new component b:search

[stephanrauh]

What about adding <b:search />? By default, this component scans every XHTML file to build a search index. Of course, not every attribute should be taken into account. This component might be useful to add a search functionality to our showcase.

The component should also offer callback functions. The idea being that users can index arbitrary content, including their database.

[zhedar]

I'm not sure, how this should behave for apps with complex dynamic content. It seems like a rather exotic use case.

However, we could implements something Autocomplete, which would deliver the search bar functionality. It could call backing bean methods as you type to get the results and populate a suggestions menu. Otherwise you could simply rely on a backing collection with a list of objects and use simple lookups to find matches.

We could then implement the indexing of the content in another way and maybe provide an example for that? I think you may want to use fulltext search engines for such a use case.

[stephanrauh]

• b:autocomplete sounds good. We could build a small search engine using a clever back-end bean.
• If the use case is too exotic, we could think about creating a second library ("BootsFaces extensions").
• I don't know how difficult it is to set up a full-text search engine, but it might be an alternative, too. Or we can combine both.

[asterd]

@stephanrauh @zhedar the autocomplete component is already available both in primefaces and butterfaces. If we want to implement it, we need to do something more. The idea to create a BootsFaces extension project seems to be good, just to insert a set of "exotic" component that is not good to insert in the main project.

About full-text search engine, i think that is very difficult to implement, because there are a lot of possibile data sources that may have data not always available in a simple way (think about a dynamic webpage based on current user, complex db schema, results of webservices call, etc..)

A first step can be the integration of an already available indexer (like lucene) and provide an interface for it, but in this way, i think we can fall in a very shady hole. An indexer require a lot of work to configure, and bootsfaces must be simple ;)

Otherwise we can think about a client side search engine like http://www.tipue.com/search/ http://lunrjs.com/

that can be useful but very simple to implement. What do you think about that??

[stephanrauh]

Cool! I hoped we could find something like a simple jQuery plugin. On first sight, lunrjs or tipue look promising.

[stephanrauh]

After running out of team members, it's unlikely we'll ever find the time required to implement this. Let's close the ticket.