Graham's Blog

Search walkthrough for CMS using SharePoint...

There are a few User Controls involved to provide the search functionality. The first is SearchInput.ascx and has the text input box and search button or image button. The only properties to change here are that only the button or the image button should be displayed at any one time, in our case its the image button. On click the GetSearchResultsPageUrl is called (from the SearchUtilites class). The search page URL is set as a property of ths SearchInput User Control via HTML. This page is then posted with the values required for the SearchResults user control to fire. How does the SearchResults.ascx user control work? On it's page_load() event it has a try catch to check if there are values in the Search Text Box. If not it returns appropriate error, but if it does it then builds the XML query for submission via the QueryService web method of the SharePoint search web service. Then a dataset is built with the results and sent to a datagrid. The Search.ascx control just pulls the SearchImput.ascx user control together with relvant HTML around it. All you change on the Search.ascx page is the SearchResultsURL property which is the URL to a posting that the above pages can use to send the results to. The posting can be any template in CMS, all it needs to have is the SearchResults.ascx user control in order to display the results. So basically the Search.ascx page takes an input from the user, and sends the query generated from the SPSSearch.xml file (along with the users free text) to a posting with the SearchResults.ascx user control via the SharePoint Search web service reference (called SPSSearch) to display the results. What we need to do now is programtically consume the SharePoint search web service for easy deployment to hosted environment.

posted by Graham Quinn @ 4:59 PM