topic Re: How do I replicate the Alfresco search via API in Alfresco Archive

How do I replicate the Alfresco search via API

vezance — Thu, 29 Dec 2016 10:39:09 GMT

I'm using Alfresco Community Edition 5.2 (EA). I'm building a separate front-end for the users to search for documents, and am using the REST APIs to communicate with Alfresco.I've noticed that the results returned via the REST API (Post > Search) match with the results shown for the same query i

Re: How do I replicate the Alfresco search via API

romschn — Thu, 29 Dec 2016 11:18:12 GMT

Are you using the same REST API which is being invoked from Alfresco Search screen? Try using that, it should return exactly the same results as you see in Alfresco search result screen.

Hope this help.

Re: How do I replicate the Alfresco search via API

vezance — Thu, 29 Dec 2016 11:30:25 GMT

Thanks Ramesh.

How do I determine which is the API invoked from the Alfresco Search screen?

Re: How do I replicate the Alfresco search via API

romschn — Thu, 29 Dec 2016 11:37:28 GMT

You may want to use the developer tools of the browser and track the network calls which should show the HTTP requests being made.

Hope this helps.

Re: How do I replicate the Alfresco search via API

afaust — Thu, 29 Dec 2016 11:48:42 GMT

The Alfresco Share Faceted Search UI uses a special (internal) ReST backend to execute queries that transparently enhances the user search terms, i.e. it adds filters to exclude results that make no sense in the Share application, adds a query template to apply the keywords (temrs) on multiple fields at the same time (i.e. name, title, description, content, tags ...), and also prepares the results in a way that they can be consumed by the UI with as little overhead as possible.

The public ReST API for queries is a raw interface to the search APIs and as such you would have to replicate a lot of the intrinsic conditionals the backend for the UI applies. Unfortunately the v1 ReST API documentation is still missing for 5.2 so it is hard to tell what parameters you'd have to set how at this time. The documentation should be there sometime in February at the latest when Alfresco One 5.2 is scheduled to be released.

Re: How do I replicate the Alfresco search via API

vezance — Thu, 29 Dec 2016 12:02:33 GMT

Thanks Axel.

Is similar documentation available for 5.1 or 5.0? I'm hoping I could glean something from there.

I've found this link but it doesn't seem to be what you are referring to.

http://docs.alfresco.com/5.0/pra/1/topics/pra-welcome-aara.html

Additionally, would I be able to achieve what I'm looking for using the CMIS REST or Java APIs, instead of the Alfresco REST APIs??

Re: How do I replicate the Alfresco search via API

afaust — Thu, 29 Dec 2016 17:59:45 GMT

The v1 ReST API is new in Alfresco 5.2 and thus there is no relevant documentation for 5.1/5.0 that you could use as reference instead.

The v1 ReST API is just a wrapper around the internal Java API, so of course you could achieve what you want to do by creating a custom web script of your own and using the Java API (or even the Script API for JavaScript-based web scripts). The CMIS API only allows CMIS SQL queries to be executed and does not support concepts like query templates, facets etc.

If you are creating a new integration with an external application I would really recommend you try and stick to the standard, new v1 ReST APIs and/or CMIS APIs as best as possible. At this time you just may have to figure one or two things out yourself until the documentation for v1 ReST API is complete. From what I understand, all the low-level search functionality should be exposed via the v1 ReST APIs, so I expect query templates and all the other features of the default search UI to be accessible via the v1 ReST API as well - I just can't tell you right now how you would have to adapt your current call since I have not worked with the new v1 ReST API myself (and there is no complete documentation yet).

Re: How do I replicate the Alfresco search via API

ddraper — Fri, 30 Dec 2016 15:19:23 GMT

The Share team evaluated the new public APIs for search that will be available in 5.2 and found they could not easily be used within the current search page in Share. One of the main issues was the way in which faceting can be requested and subsequent filters applied. Because of the way in which search was previously implemented this meant that using the new API was a non-starter for Share. Therefore the internal API is likely to stay around for as long as Share does.

It's worth noting that we have continued to improve the internal search API used by Search in 5.2 so that it includes full node metadata and now supports search term highlighting. It makes use of a re-usable search.lib.js file that could be used by custom WebScript APIs and as Axel says is just a wrapper around the Java API.

Depending upon your use case you may find the internal API fits your needs better, or you may find that the public API is a better fit.

Re: How do I replicate the Alfresco search via API

gavincornwell — Thu, 05 Jan 2017 16:20:26 GMT

Axel Faust‌ is correct, the v1 search API is a low level API, to reproduce the results from Share you'll have to match the query it executes. Fortunately, we've tried to help in that area by providing some "pre-canned" queries. One of the other new v1 REST APIs for 5.2 is /queries/nodes, the query behind this endpoint matches what Share (the v0 API) uses and should therefore give you the same results.

We do have some reference documentation available for the new APIs in the form of the API Explorer. You can grab the latest API Explorer WAR from here and apply it to your local install as shown in my first blog post. To get information on the low level search API choose "Search API" from the drop down in the header.

Hope that helps!

Re: How do I replicate the Alfresco search via API

janv — Thu, 05 Jan 2017 17:26:59 GMT

@Sanket, if you're using latest Community 5.2 release (201612 GA, 201611 EA or even 201609 EA) then another option might be to try the pre-configured query (which uses a pre-configured query template), for example:

GET .../queries/nodes?term=TERM

BTW: all of the new 5.2 REST APIs are documented via the API explorer: GitHub - Alfresco/rest-api-explorer at 5.2.0

Here's a quick snapshot view of the Queries API: Swagger UI

Please note the description "... The search term is used to look for nodes that match against name, title, description, full text content or tags. ...".

For more general background on the new 5.2 REST APIs, please also see: Alfresco 5.2 REST APIs

Regards,

Jan

Re: How do I replicate the Alfresco search via API

vezance — Fri, 06 Jan 2017 04:01:12 GMT

Thanks Gavin.

Surprisingly, I've found that GET .../queries/nodes returns results in order of modified date, by default. We are also not able to specify an 'order by' of relevance/score. Is there an update that we are likely to be missing or are we using it wrong?

Re: How do I replicate the Alfresco search via API

vezance — Fri, 06 Jan 2017 04:01:57 GMT

Thanks Jan,

I will copy-paste my reply to Gavin above:

Surprisingly, I've found that GET .../queries/nodes returns results in order of modified date, by default. We are also not able to specify an 'order by' of relevance/score. Is there an update that we are likely to be missing or are we using it wrong?

Re: How do I replicate the Alfresco search via API

gavincornwell — Fri, 06 Jan 2017 09:45:05 GMT

Sanket Baxi‌, hmm, yes, you're right, that does appear to be an oversight on our part, I have raised a story on our backlog to cover that scenario, thanks very much for your feedback.

Re: How do I replicate the Alfresco search via API

vezance — Fri, 06 Jan 2017 09:58:54 GMT

Hi Dave,

We are also evaluating the usefulness of the web API used by Share. I believe it is of this structure?

http://<IP & Port>/alfresco/service/slingshot/search?term=<term>&tag=&startIndex=0&sort=&rootNode=<rootNode>&repo=false&query=&pageSize=25&maxResults=0&spellcheck=true

I was wondering if there is a way to use search term boosting here. I tried changing to URL to (change in bold):

http://<IP & Port>/alfresco/service/slingshot/search?term=<term>&cm:description:<term>^100&tag=&startIndex=0&sort=&rootNode=<rootNode>&repo=false&query=&pageSize=25&maxResults=0&spellcheck=true

However, nothing changed in the results.

Am I doing it wrong, or is term boosting unsupported?

Re: How do I replicate the Alfresco search via API

ddraper — Mon, 09 Jan 2017 08:50:02 GMT

Unfortunately I don't know the answer to this. I will try and find out the answer to this, the value assigned to "term" will be passed through to the underlying Java API, but whether or not this is actually used I don't know.

Re: How do I replicate the Alfresco search via API

andy1 — Tue, 10 Jan 2017 18:44:58 GMT

It is possible to boost terms relative to each other.

It is currently not possible via a template, which is a known issue.

title:woof^4 OR description:woof

There are other biases from the normal lucene scoring for each term and how many ORs match.

Andy