Extending the Indexer Post Processor Using a Hook

Would you like to modify the search summaries, indexes, and queries available in your portal instance? Developing an Indexer Post Processor hook lets you do just that. The indexer hook implements a post processing system on top of the existing indexer, letting you modify your portal’s search, index, and query capabilities.

In this tutorial, you’ll run through a simple example to learn what you can accomplish with an indexer hook. For this example, you’ll add Job Title into the User Indexer, so you can search for users by job title.

Implementing the Indexer Post Processor Hook

  1. If you don’t yet have a hook project, create one following the steps in the Creating a Hook Project in the Plugins SDK tutorial.

  2. In your hook project, open docroot/WEB-INF/liferay-hook.xml and insert the following lines before the closing </hook> tag:

     <indexer-post-processor>
         <indexer-class-name>com.liferay.portal.model.User</indexer-class-name>
         <indexer-post-processor-impl>com.liferay.hook.indexer.SampleIndexerPostProcessor</indexer-post-processor-impl>
     </indexer-post-processor>
    

    You specify the indexer’s model entity in the indexer-class-name element and specify your custom indexer post processor class in the indexer-post-processor-impl element. The DTD for liferay-hook.xml is here.

  3. In your hook project’s docroot/WEB-INF/src folder, create your custom indexer post processor class and its package. Here’s code for the SampleIndexerPostProcessor custom indexer post processor class:

     package com.liferay.hook.indexer;
    
     import java.util.Locale;
     import javax.portlet.PortletURL;
     import com.liferay.portal.kernel.log.Log;
     import com.liferay.portal.kernel.log.LogFactoryUtil;
     import com.liferay.portal.kernel.search.BaseIndexerPostProcessor;
     import com.liferay.portal.kernel.search.BooleanQuery;
     import com.liferay.portal.kernel.search.Document;
     import com.liferay.portal.kernel.search.Field;
     import com.liferay.portal.kernel.search.SearchContext;
     import com.liferay.portal.kernel.search.Summary;
     import com.liferay.portal.model.User;
    
     public class SampleIndexerPostProcessor extends BaseIndexerPostProcessor {
    
         public void postProcessContextQuery(BooleanQuery booleanQuery, SearchContext searchcontext)
                 throws Exception {
             if(_log.isDebugEnabled())
                 _log.debug(" postProcessContextQuery()");
         }
    
         public void postProcessDocument(Document document, Object object)
                 throws Exception {
             User userEntity = (User) object;
             String indexerUserTitle = "";
             try {
                 indexerUserTitle = userEntity.getJobTitle();
             } catch (Exception e) {}
             if(indexerUserTitle.length() > 0)
                 document.addText(Field.TITLE, indexerUserTitle);
         }
    
         public void postProcessFullQuery(BooleanQuery fullQuery, SearchContext searchcontext)
                 throws Exception {
             if(_log.isDebugEnabled())
                 _log.debug(" postProcessFullQuery()");
         }
    
         public void postProcessSearchQuery(BooleanQuery searchquery, SearchContext searchcontext)
                 throws Exception {
             if(_log.isDebugEnabled())
                 _log.debug(" postProcessSearchQuery()");
         }
    
         public void postProcessSummary(Summary summary, Document document, Locale locale,
                 String snippet, PortletURL portletURL) {
             if(_log.isDebugEnabled())
                 _log.debug("postProcessSummary()");
         }
    
         private static Log _log = LogFactoryUtil.getLog(SampleIndexerPostProcessor.class);
     }
    

    Notice the SampleIndexerPostProcessor class extends Liferay’s BaseIndexerPostProcessor base implementation. In your custom class’ postProcessDocument method, you can add fields to index. The SampleIndexerPostProcessor class’ postProcessDocument method adds the Job Title field, enabling users to search by Job Title. You’ve just extended an indexer!

  4. Deploy the hook plugin.

  5. You now need to reindex the portal. Go to the Control Panel and click Server Administration. Click on the Execute button for the Action Reindex all search indexes.

    Figure 1: Click Execute to reindex the search indexes.

    Figure 1: Click *Execute* to reindex the search indexes.

  6. Navigate to Control PanelUsers and OrganizationsAll Users and select a user. Assign the user a job title (e.g., Blogger) and click Save.

  7. Test the indexer hook by searching for the user by the job title you assigned.

Figure 2: By extending the indexer post processor for a model entity, you can search for instances of that model based on the fields you add to the indexer post processor. In this example, you extended the User entitys search index to include Job Title so you could search for users by job title (e.g., Blogger).

Figure 2: By extending the indexer post processor for a model entity, you can search for instances of that model based on the fields you add to the indexer post processor. In this example, you extended the User entity's search index to include *Job Title* so you could search for users by job title (e.g., *Blogger*).

Great! Now you know the basics of extending the Indexer Post Processor using a hook.

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Customizing Liferay Portal with Hooks

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