Live Search in Kirby 3

The CMS Questions
1

Hey there,

I am trying to implement a live search on my page that makes use of the Kirby search feature and Ajax. I was trying to move the methods from this old Kirby 2 thread into Kirby 3 land.

What I have now is this:

// site/config/config.php
  'routes' => [
    [
      'pattern' => 'search/(:all)',
      'action' => function ($uri) {

        $results = site()->search($uri, 'title|description');

        return [
          'query'   => $uri,
          'results' => $results
        ];
      }
    ]
  ]

This returns the desired JSON for me and can be called with some Ajax setup.
I guess my two questions are, because I don’t really know what I am doing:

  • Is this the correct way / best practice? Seems to work at first glance, but I am not sure.
  • Then I want to return some page field’s contents with the resulting pages (let’s say the contents of the title field and the description field), how can these contents be included into the returned JSON?

Thanks!

2

Also, I’m having trouble understanding the response type. The docs say that search() returns a pages object. But when I test the above route in a browser, I get a JSON like this:

{
  "query": "thumbnail",
  "results": {
    "data": {
      "bridge/2019/thumbnail": {
        "content": {},
        "translations": null,
        "children": {
          "data": []
        },
        "drafts": null,
        "searchHits": 182,
        "searchScore": 1192
      },
      "bridge/2019/document": {
        "content": {},
        "translations": null,
        "children": {
          "data": []
        },
        "drafts": null,
        "searchHits": 156,
        "searchScore": 82
      }
    }
  }
}

I’m not sure, is this a pages object converted to JSON?
If so, how can I retrieve or carry along certain field values of each page?

3

Yes, that is in fact the case, but in a PHP context. From the routes, you get a JSON response.

You can, of course, return the data in the format you need by creating a custom array inside your route that you then return, i.e. including the data you need.

4

And that’s what I didn’t understand how to do. But thanks to your suggestion, I was now able to figure it out how to pass along these values:

  'routes' => [
    [
      'pattern' => 'search/(:all)',
      'action' => function ($uri) {

        $results = site()->search($uri, 'title|description');

        foreach ($results as $result) {
          $result->title = $result->title()->value();
          $result->description = html::decode($result->description()->kt()->value());
        }

        return [
          'query'   => $uri,
          'results' => $results
        ];
      }
    ]
  ]

One more question about the live search via route: I want to search for pages from the current parent page down only (so not the entire site). But how can I reference the current page (and its parent) in a route that is defined in config?

5

Ok, for my specific scenario I could solve it like this, I changed my pattern and search function to

'pattern' => 'search/(:any)/(:num)/(:all)'

'action' => function ($app, $ver, $uri) {

  $results = site()->page($app . '/' . $ver)->search($uri, 'title|description');

and then in my JavaScript I modified the Ajax call accordingly to pass these url parts as well. If there’s an easier way to do this, I would be happy to hear it.

One more question on this topic:
Is there a kirby way of getting the position of the (first) match of a search result? I would like to find the matching part below my live search field. Or would I rather need to handle this part via JavaScript in my case?

6

I created this simple method a while ago:

/**
 * Used for search to highlight the relevant search text
 */
function getResultText(Kirby\Cms\Field $text, $query) 
{
    if (stripos($text, $query)) {
      $text        = strip_tags($text->kt());
      $startQ      = stripos($text, $query);
      $queryLength = strlen($query);
      $preText     = substr($text, $startQ-150, 150);
      $afterText   = substr($text, $startQ+$queryLength, 150);
      $queryText   = substr($text, stripos($text, $query), $queryLength);
      $text        = '…' . $preText . '<span class="searchterm-highlight">' . $queryText . '</span>' . $afterText . '…';
    } else {
        $text      = $text->kt()->excerpt(250);
    }
    return $text;
}

But I only used that on the text field, not the title. The purpose was to highlight the search term and to output some characters around this term.