Defining local page indexes

You can use two types of locally stored search indexes for the pages of websites (i.e. pages in the content tree):

To define which pages an index covers, specify allowed or excluded content:

1. Open the Smart search application.
2. Select the Local indexes tab.
3. Edit () the index.
4. Select the Indexed content tab.
5. Click Add allowed content or Add excluded content.
6. Open the Sites tab and assign the websites where you wish to use the index.
7. Switch to the Cultures tab and select which language versions of the website’s pages are indexed.
   • At least one culture must be assigned in order for the index to be functional.

Adding allowed content

Allowed content defines which of the website’s pages are included in the index. Specify pages using a combination of the following options:

• Path – path expression identifying the pages that should be indexed.
• Page types – allows you to limit which page types are included in the index.

The following properties define types of additional content that you can include in Page search indexes. The settings are not available for Pages crawler indexes:

• Include ad-hoc forums – includes the content of ad-hoc forums placed on the specified pages (if there are any).
• Include blog comments – includes blog comments posted for blog post pages.
• Include message boards – includes message boards placed on the specified pages.
• Include attachment content – if selected, the index includes the text content of files attached to the specified pages. See Searching attachment files for more information.
• Include categories – if selected, the index stores the display names of Categories assigned to the specified pages. This allows users to find pages that belong to categories whose name matches the search expression.

Examples

Adding excluded content

Excluded content allows you to remove pages or entire website sections from the allowed content. For example, if you allow /% and exclude /Special‑pages/% at the same time, the index will include all pages on the site except for the ones found under the /Special-pages node.

You can specify the following options:

• Path – path expression identifying the pages that should be excluded.
• Page types – allows you to limit which page types are excluded from the index.

Examples

Configuring search settings for page fields

Pages are often complex data structures with many different fields. Not all fields may be relevant to the search that you are implementing. Page types allow you to adjust how the system indexes specific fields. We recommend indexing only necessary fields to keep your indexes as small (and fast) as possible.

To edit the field search settings for page types:

1. Open the Page types application.
2. Edit () a page type.
3. Open the Search fields tab.

The options in the top part of the tab allow you to configure how the system displays pages of the given type in search results. Note that the final appearance of the search results always depends on your view implementations (for MVC sites) or on the used search result transformation (for Portal Engine sites).

• Title field – select the page field whose value is used for the title of search results.
• Content field – the field whose value is used for the content extract of search results.
• Image field – the field that contains the image displayed in search results.
• Date field – the field whose value is used for the date and time displayed in search results.

The grid in the bottom section of the tab determines how the smart search indexes the page type’s fields (as defined on the Fields tab).

For locally stored search indexes, only the options under the Local and General sections of the grid apply (to learn about Azure Search page indexes, see Creating Azure Search indexes). You can set the following search options for individual fields:

When running searches using page indexes, the system returns results according to the field search settings of individual page types. The page type search settings are shared by all page indexes in the system.

SKU (product) and general page fields

To configure the field search settings for E-commerce SKUs (products):

1. Open the Modules application.
2. Edit () the E-commerce module.
3. Open the Classes tab.
4. Edit the SKU class.
5. Select the Search tab.
6. Click Customize.

You can configure the search settings for fields just like for page types. The SKU fields are joined together with general page fields, such as fields that store the content of editable regions on pages (DocumentContent) or the content of text widgets (DocumentWebParts).

Configuring page crawler indexes

Page crawler search indexes read the content of pages while logged in under a user account. You can configure the following properties for every page crawler index (on the General tab of the index editing interface):

By default, page crawlers also index pages that use redirection from the site’s main domain name to a domain alias. To only allow indexing for pages that use the website’s main domain, set the CMSCrawlerAllowSiteAliasRedirect key to false in your application’s web.config file:

<add key="CMSCrawlerAllowSiteAliasRedirect" value="false" />

The key applies to all page crawler indexes in the system.

Customizing how crawlers process page content (API)

By default, the system converts the HTML output of pages to plain text before saving it to page crawler indexes:

• Strips all HTML tags
• Removes the Head tag, Style tags and all JavaScript
• Converts all whitespace formatting to simple spaces

If you wish to index the content of any tags or exclude parts of the page output, you can customize how the crawlers process the HTML. You need to implement your custom functionality in a handler of the OnHtmlToPlainText event of the CMS.Search.SearchCrawler class. This event occurs whenever a page search crawler processes the HTML output of a page.

To assign a method as the handler for the OnHTMLToPlainText event, create a custom module class and override its OnInit method. Add the class into a custom project (library) within the Kentico solution.

For example, you can define the content of the class as shown below:

using System.Web;

using CMS;
using CMS.DataEngine;
using CMS.Search;
using CMS.Helpers;

// Registers the custom module into the system
[assembly: RegisterModule(typeof(CustomSearchCrawlerModule))]

public class CustomSearchCrawlerModule : Module
{
    // Module class constructor, the system registers the module under the name "CustomSearchCrawler"
    public CustomSearchCrawlerModule()
        : base("CustomSearchCrawler")
    {
    }    

    // Contains initialization code that is executed when the application starts
    protected override void OnInit()
    {
        base.OnInit();

        // Assigns a handler for the OnHtmlToPlainText event
        SearchCrawler.OnHtmlToPlainText += new SearchCrawler.HtmlToPlainTextHandler(SearchHelper_OnHtmlToPlainText);
    }

    // Add your custom HTML processing actions and return the result as a string
    static string SearchHelper_OnHtmlToPlainText(string plainText, string originalHtml)
    {
        string outputResult = originalHtml;

        // Removes new line entities
        outputResult = outputResult.Replace("\n", " ");

        // Removes tab spaces
        outputResult = outputResult.Replace("\t", " ");

        // Removes JavaScript
        outputResult = HTMLHelper.RegexHtmlToTextScript.Replace(outputResult, " ");

        // Removes tags
        outputResult = HTMLHelper.RegexHtmlToTextTags.Replace(outputResult, " ");

        // Decodes HTML entities
        outputResult = HttpUtility.HtmlDecode(outputResult);

        return outputResult;
    }
}

The OnHTMLToPlainText event provides the following string parameters to the handler:

• plainText – the page output already stripped of all tags and converted to plain text
• originalHTML – the raw page HTML code without any modifications