Some ideas for improving search

[andydandy74]

Having worked with revitapidocs.com for a while now, here are some ideas of how the search UX could be improved:

• Constrain search to certain categories (classes, methods, properties)
• Make search available on the landing page (perhaps move the search field into the page header?)
• Show search results as a new page (currently clicking on a search result will take me to that result but the browser's Back button will not let me return to the search results - which has led me to generally open search results in a new tab)
• Show more context in search results (e.g. if result is a property show the name of the class, too)

[gtalarico]

Thanks @andydandy74 great suggestions.

Constrain search to certain categories (classes, methods, properties)

Will add to backlog

1. Make search available on the landing page (perhaps move the search field into the page header?)

Will add to backlog. I would think people usually target a specific API when they search. Maybe a text input with a filter dropdown filter for api year would work. See # 2

1. Show search results as a new page

New search features will trigger re-thinking the search backend and UI. I will keep this in mind.

1. Show more context in search results (e.g. if result is a property show the name of the class, too)

Will add. Need to think about how to implement

Most of these improvments (except #2) require backend changes. This was in my roadmap for 2.0: I need to create my own index of all pages in a DB (extract article type, namespace, etc) so I can query/filter/list by those parameters efficiently

Currently search only searches for article name from a json that stores the namespace tree, which is fast but limited https://raw.githubusercontent.com/gtalarico/revitapidocs/master/app/templates/json/ns_2015.json

In the meantime if you need better search, you can use the public Google Custom Search Engine: https://cse.google.com/cse/publicurl?cx=014747897160299638528:fxtbgkrsxas

[gtalarico]

Split into issues #42 #43 #43 #44

[gtalarico]

Commit 378a17bf0b3f76584703777a7ebf937fa1635972 now saves scroll location and filter for search results