Customizing Liferay Search

There are several extension points available for users to customize. The most obvious is the ability to add a new search engine adapter.

Adding a new Search Engine Adapter

To add a new search engine adapter, developers must create the following components and publish them to Liferay’s OSGi registry:

1. Implement a new IndexSearcher that should convert the Liferay Search objects to the underlying search engine’s dialects:

   • QueryTranslator: Translates Liferay Queries to the native search engine’s queries.
   • FilterTranslator: Translates Liferay filters into native search engine’s filters.
   • GroupByTranslator: Translates the GroupBy aggregation to the search engine’s group by top hits aggregation.
   • StatsTranslator: Translates Stats request to the appropriate search engine’s statistics aggregation.
   • SuggesterTranslator: Translates suggestion requests to the appropriate search engine’s suggester API.

2. Implement a new IndexWriter that should

   • Convert the Liferay Document to a format understood by the underlying search engine’s Document Format.
   • Use the search engine’s API to update, add, and delete documents.

3. Implement a new SearchEngineConfigurator that should extend AbstractSearchEngineConfigurator to perform proper wiring.

4. Implement a new SearchEngine that

   • Should extend from BaseSearchEngine to perform any search engine specific initialization.
   • Should be published to Liferay’s OSGi registry along with the property search.engine.id=[searchEngineId].

Customizing IndexerRequestBufferOverflowHandler

IndexerRequestBufferOverflowHandler controls how the search infrastructure handles situations where buffered indexer requests has exceeded the configured maximum buffer size.

To customize, implement an IndexerRequestBufferOverflowHandler and publish it to Liferay’s OSGi registry.

Customizing HitsProcessors

com.liferay.portal.kernel.hits.HitsProcessor objects are held in a com.liferay.portal.kernel.hits.HitsProcessorRegistry. To add a new HitsProcessor, simply implement the interface and publish to the OSGi registry with the property sort.order.