What's New in Search

Lots of new and improved search capabilities are present in Liferay DXP 7.2, from new widgets to new APIs and infrastructure.

New and Improved Widgets

Add search widgets by clicking the Add (Add) icon on the page. Then expand the Widgets → Search section.

Custom Filter

New Widget

Add a widget to the page for each of the filters you’d like applied to the search results. Let search page users see and manipulate the filters or make them invisible and/or immutable (this is just a cool word for “they can’t be changed”).

For example, add a custom filter to ensure that all returned results have the keyword street in the content field.

Sort

New Widget

The Sort widget reorders the results based on the value of certain keyword fields in the index. For example, show results in alphabetic order of the Title field. The default order is determined by the search engine’s Relevance calculation.

Add more fields to the sort widget if the default options aren’t enough. Click the widget Options (Options) menu → Configuration. Enter a human readable label and the fieldName to sort by. Just make sure it’s a keyword field.

Search Insights

Improved

Past versions of Search Insights showed you the full query string sent to the search engine, but now it also displays the response from the search engine with an explanation of the score for each search hit.

New Search Admin Functionality

The Search Admin functionality is found in Control Panel → Configuration → Search.

Search Engine Info

The displayed Search Engine information is enhanced, showing the client and node information as well as the vendor and operation mode.

Field Mappings

The Field Mappings tab shows the field mappings for all indexes in the search engine.

Indexing Progress

Indexing now displays a progress bar so you can see in the UI when the re-indexing action has completed.

New System Settings

Access the Search System Settings at Control Panel → Configuration → System Settings → Search.

There’s a new entry in the search category: Title Field Query Builder. Use it to configure how search responds to matches on the Title field of a document.

Exact Match boost: Give an additional boost when searched keywords exactly match the title field of a document.

Maximum Expansions: Limit the number of documents to return when matching searched keywords to the title field as a phrase prefix. See Elasticsearch’s Match Phrase Query documentation for more information.

New Infrastructure

There are some important search infrastructure changes to know about.

Elasticsearch Support

Liferay DXP 7.2 supports Elasticsearch 6.5.x through 6.8.x, and 6.5.0 is included as the embedded version to use for testing out-of-the-box search behavior. See the deployment guide for more information.

Application-Specific Indexes

You’ll notice more search indexes in Liferay DXP 7.2. That’s because you can now configure application-specific indexes. At the time of this writing, the additional indexes are all related to the DXP Workflow Metrics feature. More will likely appear in future versions, and third party developers can use the portal-search APIs to create their own indexes. It’s under development, so visit the Search Framework documentation frequently to discover new search infrastructure changes that expose more functionality for developers.

API Enhancements

Enhancements to the search framework APIs include

  • Low level indexing and queries
  • Operations directly on indexed documents (no need for the Indexer framework)
  • New Aggregation types

Liferay DXP’s support for multi-language search took a step forward, with improvements to Documents and Media and Web Content. More improvements are necessary in this area and will be prioritized in future releases. See the Multi-Language Search article for more information.

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