Now you have a working Guestbook portlet as well as a completed Guestbook Admin portlet. The Guestbook portlet allows users to create guestbooks and to add, edit, configure permissions for, and delete guestbook entries. The Guestbook Admin portlet allows site administrators to create, edit, configure permissions for, and delete guestbooks. To increase the usability of the Guestbook portlet, especially for situations where many entries have been added to one or more guestbooks, you’ll next make guestbook entries searchable. When you’re done, users will be able to enter search queries into a search bar on the Guestbook portlet. If a search query matches an entry’s message or name, the entry will appear in the search results.
You’ll not only add an indexer for guestbook entries, but also for guestbooks themselves. Although you don’t anticipate having so many guestbooks in a single site that searching for them would be useful, creating a guestbook indexer has other benefits. In a later learning path, you’ll asset-enable both guestbook entries and guestbooks themselves. For performance reasons, Liferay’s Asset Publisher portlet queries for assets to display via search indexes instead of via database queries. In order to fully asset-enable an entity, it must have an indexer. In this learning path, you’ll create a guestbook indexer and update the guestbook service layer to use it since it’s a prerequisite for asset-enabling guestbooks.
Figure 1: You'll add a search bar to the Guestbook portlet so that users can search for guestbook entries. If a guestbook entry's message or name matches the search query, it's displayed in the search results.