SearchBundle

The SuluSearchBundle is mainly an integration of the MassiveSearchBundle into Sulu. There is also the MassiveSearchBundle Documentation explaining this Bundle in more detail. This documentation is also valid for using it with Sulu, although there are some extensions made by the SuluSearchBundle. It offers a controller to provide a web API to search through the system, adds more fields - like creator and changer - to the search documents and also handles the security provided by Sulu. But the most important thing is that it also contains the administration user interface.

Configuration

The configuration of this bundle contains some more metadata about each index created by the MassiveSearchBundle consisting of the following values:

  • name: Can contain a name for the index, which will be used in the UI. Useful if the index represents something a non-translatable literal can describe.
  • security_context: This setting is used to describe which security context (see SecurityBundle) the user has to have view permission in, in order to search through this index.
  • icon: Describes which icon should be used in the search result if no image is available.
  • view: Contains information necessary to navigate to the correct form on a click on the search result. This includes the name of the route and a map called result_to_view, which maps fields from the search result to the edit form.

So a sample configuration would look like this:

sulu_search:
    indexes:
        contact:
            name: 'sulu_contact.people'
            icon: 'su-user'
            security_context: 'sulu.contacts.people'
            contexts: []
            view:
                name: sulu_contact.contact_edit_form
                result_to_view:
                    id: id
                    locale: locale

Note

It is also possible to use PrependExtensions or in more complicated cases to change the value of the sulu_search.indexes parameter in a CompilerPass. Actually that is what most of the Sulu bundles are doing to minimize the configuration effort of the application.

Templating

The SuluSearchBundle has a WebsiteSearchController, which loads the template from the currently loaded webspace. It therefore uses the RequestAnalyzer, and asks the webspace for its template of type search. This template can then be defined for every webspace in its XML configuration:

<templates>
    <template type="search">ClientWebsiteBundle:views:search.html.twig</template>
</templates>

See Setup a Webspace for more details.

Reindexing

Re-indexing is the process of reading all of the documents in the system and regenerating their search records. This is necessary when changes are made to the metadata and it is desirable to propagate these changes over all of the indexed documents / entities in the system – or when you import new data (e.g. from a backup) and need to index that data.

To re-index all entities (Contacts, Media, etc.) and documents (Pages, Snippets) simply run the following:

$ php bin/console massive:search:reindex --env=prod

Warning

At the moment it is required to also execute php bin/websiteconsole massive:search:reindex –env=prod to reindex the pages also for the website.

This may take anywhere between a minute and several hours depending on how much data you have in your system.

To increase speed and reduce memory consumption:

  • Use the --env=prod (see note below) switch to force the production settings: This will reduce logging and increase speed and lead to lower memory consumption.
  • Ensure that the document manager has the debug: false option. This reduces logging dramatically.

To recover if the process is interrupted:

  • You may resume the task simply by running it again.
  • Use the --provider option to limit the reindexing to a certain reindex provider, for example --provider=doctrine_orm.

Important

In recomending the prod environment we assume that you have not changed the default environment configuration. The important point is that logging increases memory consumption and should be disabled.