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Plugin: Generate auto-completion from search index

Purpose

Use this plugin to generate structured auto-completion from your search index.

This plugin generates a structured auto-completion source from the search index.

Unlike most other results page plugins you will need to run an update (such as advanced update > re-index the live view) after saving your plugin to ensure the auto-completion indexes are generated.

Configuring the trigger(s)

The main part of configuring this plugin is to set one or more appropriate triggers to compare to and defining what will be returned as the suggestion. The trigger is a word (or set of words) that are used to generate a suggestion, if it starts with whatever the user has typed into the search box.

By default, the trigger will only match from the start of a multiple word trigger. If you wish each word to be compared to what the user has typed you need to set the match each word in a multi-word trigger option (see below).

Terminology

  • Partial query: what the user has typed in to a search input box so far. e.g. Stev.

  • Suggestion: the query completion suggested to the user as a possible auto-completion of their partial query. e.g. Steven.

  • Trigger: The name of the field in which to look for suggestions e.g. metadata.firstName.

Valid values

This plugin supports triggers specified using JsonPath expressions, which are compared to an individual results taken from the search result data model:

triggers Description

/title

(Default) Suggestions will be sourced from the document title

/listMetadata/<field>

Suggestions will be sourced from the field metadata property.

/listMetadata/<field1>,/listMetadata/<field2>

Suggestions will be sourced from the field1 and field2 metadata properties.
If there’s no value specified for the trigger, or if the plugin can’t find the provided metadata then the plugin will take the title of the result object as the trigger.

Usage

Enable the plugin

  1. Select Plugins from the side navigation pane and click on the Generate auto-completion from search index tile.

  2. From the Location section, select the results page to which you would like to enable this plugin from the Select a results page select list.

The plugin will take effect as soon as you finish running through the plugin setup steps.

Configuration settings

The configuration settings section is where you do most of the configuration for your plugin. The settings enable you to control how the plugin behaves.

The configuration key names below are only used if you are configuring this plugin manually. The configuration keys are set in the results page configuration to configure the plugin. When setting the keys manually you need to type in (or copy and paste) the key name and value.

Trigger sources

Configuration key

plugin.auto-completion-plugin.config.triggers

Data type

array

Default value

[/title]

Required

This setting is required

Comma-separated list of fields in JsonPath format from where auto-completion triggers are sourced.

The values contained within these fields will be used as the trigger values.

The JsonPaths are applied to the search result element (/title corresponds to the result.title element from the search data model for an individual search result).

Action type

Configuration key

plugin.auto-completion-plugin.config.action-type

Data type

string

Default value

Q

Allowed values

Q,U

Required

This setting is optional

Action to perform when the suggestion is selected. U: open the URL which is sourced from the result.liveUrl field in the search result data model. Q: execute the suggestion as a query (default).

Data sources to include

Configuration key

plugin.auto-completion-plugin.config.data-sources

Data type

array

Required

This setting is optional

Comma-separated list of data source IDs from where suggestions are sourced.

Acceptable values are a subset of these data source IDs.

By default, results will be sourced from all data sources included in the results page.

Display fields

Configuration key

plugin.auto-completion-plugin.config.display-fields

Data type

array

Default value

[/title]

Required

This setting is required

Comma-separated list of result fields (expressed using JsonPaths) to return in the display object.

The values contained within these fields will be returned by the auto-completion web service in the response for use in your auto-completion template.

The JsonPaths are applied to the search result element (/title corresponds to the result.title element from the search data model for an individual search result).

Category field

Configuration key

plugin.auto-completion-plugin.config.category

Data type

string

Required

This setting is optional

JsonPath to a metadata field from where a category of the suggestion (to enable grouping of suggestions) will be sourced.

Category can be only sourced from a metadata field and only the first value will be used as the category value.

The JsonPaths are applied to the search result element (e.g. /listMetadata/category corresponds to the listMetadata["category"][0] element from the search data model for an individual search result).

Match each word in a multi-word trigger

Configuration key

plugin.auto-completion-plugin.config.trigger-expansion

Data type

boolean

Default value

false

Required

This setting is optional

This controls if the partial query is matched against each word in a multi-word trigger. e.g. 'smi' will match a 'john smith' trigger.

Possible values are:

  • true: generate extra triggers that will allow a user’s query to match the start of a word inside a multi-word trigger. This provides similar behaviour to the -partials mode for simple auto-completion. e.g. For a trigger value, John Proctor Leopold Smith trigger, generate extra triggers Proctor Leopold Smith, Leopold Smith and Smith.

  • false: (default) Only generate a single trigger value. e.g. for a value of John Proctor Leopold Smith only trigger the suggestion when someone starts typing joh.

Triggers starting with a stop word (such as and or the) will be skipped.

Auto-completion source

Configuration key

auto-completion.source

Data type

string

Default value

internal

auto-completion.source is a standard results page option that controls the sources of auto-completion when the auto-completion indexes are generated. By default, auto-completion generated on a result-page contains organic spelling suggestions.

In many cases you will want your generated auto-completion to only contain your structured suggestions. This setting will prevent the spelling-based suggestions from being added.

To configure this setting you will need to access the results page configuration screen (edit results page configuration) after you have finished setting up your plugin as set the following configuration key to suppress the spelling-based suggestions:

Plugin setting Value

auto-completion.source

(set this to an empty value)

Configuring trigger expansion

The plugin is able to expand a single trigger into multiple partial triggers by stripping words from the beginning of the trigger.

For example:

Funnelback Search Engine becomes Funnelback Search Engine, Search Engine, Engine

When the trigger contains very common english words (aka stop words) these will be skipped rather than being used to begin a trigger, to, for example, avoid the issue of thousands of triggers beginning with 'and'.

This mode is not enabled by default. To enable this mode, set the following config setting in the results page containing the plugin:

Plugin setting Value

Match each word in a multi-word trigger

true

Configuring the contents of the disp property (the display fields)

By default, the suggestion endpoint disp property contains a plain text string that matches the trigger value.

To get a JSON object with more details about the suggestion match, specify a list of JsonPath expressions in the display-fields configuration setting. Search result values that match the JsonPath values will be copied across to the disp object, with expressions that don’t match silently dropped.

For example, to return the title, url, and listMetadata.lastName values, you would specify:

Plugin setting Value

Display fields

/title,/url,/listMetadata/lastName

For the first search result from the example above, this will result in the following disp object:

{
    "title": "Steven Smith | Senior Lecturer",
    "url": "http://funnelback-university/staff/123",
    "listMetadata": {
        "lastName": ["Smith"]
    }
}

If fields that don’t exist are specified, they are not returned in the disp result. e.g.

Plugin setting Value

Display fields

/title, /foo, /listMetadata/lastName, /listMetadata/foobar

results in:

{
    "title": "Steven Smith | Senior Lecturer",
    "listMetadata": {
        "lastName": ["Smith"]
    }
}

Examples

Examples for setting different keys

Example: use the title and summary fields as triggers.

Plugin setting Value

Trigger sources

/title,/summary

Example: go to a URL when the suggestion is clicked.

Plugin setting Value

Action to perform when the suggestion is selected

U

Example: data sources

Plugin setting Value

Data sources to include

client~ds-staff, client~ds-customers

Example: include title and metadata firstName elements:

Plugin setting Value

Display fields

/title,/listMetadata/firstName

Example: source the category from the category metadata field.

Plugin setting Value

Category field

/listMetadata/category

Example: Generate auto-completion from a staff directory

[{
    ...
    "title": "Steven Smith | Senior Lecturer",
    "url": "http://funnelback-university/staff/123",
    "listMetadata": {
        "firstName": ["Steven"],
        "lastName": ["Smith"]
    },
    ...
}, {
    ...
    "title": "Steve Wonder | Fellow",
    "url": "http://funnelback-university/staff/456",
    "listMetadata": {
        "firstName": ["Steve"],
        "lastName": ["Wonder"]
    },
    ...
}, {
    ...
    "title": "Jane Doe | Dean",
    "url": "http://funnelback-university/staff/789",
    "listMetadata": {
        "firstName": ["Jane"],
        "lastName": ["Doe"]
    },
    ...
}]

If the plugin was configured with:

Plugin setting Value

Trigger sources

/listMetadata/firstName

When a user starts searching for Stev, this plugin will compare Stev against ["Steve", "Jane", "Steven"] and offer Steve and Steven as auto-completion suggestions.

If the plugin was configured with:

Plugin setting Value

Trigger sources

/listMetadata/firstName,/listMetadata/lastName

this plugin will compare Stev against ["Steven", "Smith", "Steve", "Wonder", "Jane", "Doe" ].

If the plugin was configured with:

Plugin setting Value

Trigger sources

/title

The suggestions for Stev would be: Steven Smith Senior Lecturer and Steve Wonder Fellow

Change log

[2.1.0]

Changed

  • Updated to the latest version plugin framework (Funnelback shared v16.20) to enable integration with the new plugin management dashboard.

[2.0.3]

Changed

  • Upgraded jackson-datatype-guava dependency from v2.10.3 to 2.12.5

  • Use Java native isBlank method as in Jsoup v1.12.1 class org.jsoup.helper.StringUtil was moved and marked for internal use only.

[2.0.2]

Added

  • Summary field will show full data

[2.0.1]

Added

  • plugin.auto-completion-plugin.config.category configuration key to set category field.

[2.0.0]

Added

  • plugin.auto-completion-plugin.config.data-sources configuration key to scope suggestions from particular data sources.

Changed

  • Configuration key to set triggers (see upgrade notes).

[1.0.0]

Added

  • plugin.auto-completion-plugin.config.trigger configuration key to set suggestion trigger.

  • plugin.auto-completion-plugin.config.action-type configuration key to define action to execute on selecting suggestion.

  • plugin.auto-completion-plugin.config.display-fields configuration key to define list of fields to return with suggestion to customize the suggestion display.

See also