Use Find for CSR UI

If you have been using Find, you might be surprised to find that CSR UI uses the SearchProvider internally. This is a bit unfortunate because you likely are using Find, and that creates unnecessary complexity. For starter, you need to configure a SearchProvider, then you need to index the entries, separately from the Find index. If you install EPiServer.CloudPlatform.Commerce, it will setup the DXPLucenceSearchProvider for you, which is basically a wrapper of LuceneSearchProvider to let it work on DXP (i.e. Azure storage). But even with that, you have to index your entries anyway. You can use FindSearchProvider, but that actually just creates another problem – it uses a different index compared to Find, so you double your index count, yet you have still make sure to index your content. Is there a better way – to use the existing Find indexed content?

Yes, there is

Searches for entries in CSR is done by IEntrySearchService which the default implementation uses the configured SearchProvider internally . Fortunately for us, as with most thing in Commerce, we can create our own implementation and inject it. Now that’s with a caveat – IEntrySearchService is marked as BETA remark, so prepare for some breaking changes without prior notice. However it has not changed much since its inception (funny thing, when I checked for its history, I was the one who created it 6 years ago, in 2017. Feeling old now), and if it is changed, it would be quite easy to adapt for such changes.

IEntrySearchService is a simple with just one method:

IEnumerable<int> Search(string keyword, MarketId marketId, Currency currency, string siteId);

It is a bit weird to return an IEnumerable<int> (what was I thinking ? ), but it was likely created as a scaffolding of SearchManager.Search which returns an IEnumerable<int>, and was not updated later. Anyway, an implementation using Find should look like this:

    public class FindEntrySearchService : IEntrySearchService
    {
        private EPiServer.Find.IClient _searchClient;

        public FindEntrySearchService(EPiServer.Find.IClient searchClient) => _searchClient = searchClient;

        public IEnumerable<int> Search(string keyword, MarketId marketId, Currency currency, string siteId)
        {
            return _searchClient.Search<EntryContentBase>()
                 .For(keyword)
                 .Filter(x => x.MatchMarketId(marketId))
                 .Filter(x => x.SiteId().Match(siteId))
                 .Filter(x => FilterPriceAvailableForCurrency<IPricing>(y => y.Prices(), currency))
                 .GetResult()
                 .Select(x => x.ContentLink.ID);
        }

        public FilterExpression<Price> FilterPriceAvailableForCurrency<T>(Expression<Func<T, IEnumerable<Price>>> prices, Currency currency)
        {
            var currencyCode = currency != null ? currency.CurrencyCode : string.Empty;

            return new NestedFilterExpression<T, Price>(prices, price => price.UnitPrice.Currency.CurrencyCode.Match(currencyCode), _searchClient.Conventions);
        }
    }

Note that I am not an expert on Find, especially on NestedFilterExpression, so my FilterPriceAvailableForCurrency might be wrong. Feel free to correct it, the code is not copyrighted and is provided as-is.

As always, you need to register this implementation for IEntrySearchService. You can add it anywhere you like as long as it’s after .AddCommerce.

_services.AddSingleton<IEntrySearchService, FindEntrySearchService>();