Internal Search¶

The Internal Search is a default SQL based engine implementation, created to support the most basic queries. While not as fast and less feature rich (no filters or aggregations) compared to specialized search engines, this search engine provides a decent option for smaller Indico instances which may not want to spend additional time on deploying a separate service just for search.

It supports the two types of records from a total of six targets:

Events
Categories
Contributions
Attachments
Notes

Note

The Internal Search only supports text-based search on titles, description and notes content.

External Search Service¶

Indico provides several powerful features for aggregation and filtering when combined with an external search service supporting them, such as Citadel.

Aggregations¶

Aggregations, as seen in Elastic Search, provide a way to combine information in groups according to a certain metric, such as a field value, sum or average.

../../_images/search_features_aggregation.png

Indico supports any bucket or metric group, composed of a key, count and filter key:

class indico.modules.search.result_schemas.AggregationSchema¶

Represents an aggregation list.

buckets: List[BucketSchema]¶: A bucket list representing each group.

label: str¶: The name of the aggregation.

class indico.modules.search.result_schemas.BucketSchema¶

Represents an individual aggregation bucket element.

count: int¶: The number of elements.

filter: str¶: The key that identifies the element’s filter.

key: str¶: The aggregation key.

Filters¶

Filters act combined upon a certain aggregation on structured data. Consider the following bucket group composed of a single affiliation:

{
    "affiliation": {
        "label": "Affiliation",
        "buckets": {
            "key": "CERN",
            "count": 5,
            "filter": "cern"
        }
    }
}

The combination of key and filter from AggregationSchema can be used as a way to define a human-readable label to an attribute. A corresponding filter acting upon the same key in the example above would be affiliation=cern.

Placeholders¶

Placeholders are a special type of filters specifically designed to be part of the user-facing text based search query. Examples of valid placeholders would be: affiliation:CERN or person:”John Doe”.

Indico expects to receive a list of valid placeholders through get_placeholders() where each one will be merely hinted to the user while doing a text based search.

class indico.modules.search.base.IndicoSearchProvider¶

get_placeholders()¶

Retrieve the list of search shortcuts that will be shown to users when typing a search query.

Returns: a list of SearchOption instances