Learning XPages Part 53 : Building The Search Results XPage

Our search bar is complete but searching
for something right now will result in an error because the page that we
are trying to open does not exist in the application. In this part I’m
going to build the search results XPage and show you how to display the
results.

Lets start by copying and pasting one
of our existing XPages and renaming it to ‘Search’. Because I want to search
for people I have decided to copy the ‘Location’ XPage. Once renamed I
then went to the custom control and duplicated the content_Location custom
control and renamed it to content_Search. I then returned to the ‘Search’
XPage and in the source view I updated it to use the ‘content_Search’ custom
control instead of the content_Location one. By breaking your application
layout into these smaller custom controls you can quickly add entire new
parts to the application just like we have done here.

Now lets open the content_Search custom
control. There are a few things we need to do to tidy this custom control
up before we make it display the search results. The first thing we need
to do is remove the two panels at the top of the screen that display the
location information and the action bar. You should just have your pager
and table ( with repeat inside ) left on the screen.

In the data tab for the custom control
you can remove the datasource for the locationDoc so you are just left
with the datasource for the peopleView.

You can also remove the server side
script library from the resources section and in the all properties section
you can remove the beforePagesLoads script.

Our page is now cleaned of all the bits
we no longer need, all that’s left to do it tell the data source that we
want to do a search.

Staying in the all properties view for
the custom control open out the data section till you find your data source.
We want to make sure that the search is done across all the documents in
the view so we will need to remove the categoryFilter.

Next move down to the search property.
In here we will compute the value so click on the diamond and enter in
the following code

Now save the custom control and try
doing a search in your application. Here’s the result of a search for the
name Smith.

You might want to adjust the table to
show the location name for the person but in terms of searching that’s
it. Simple.