Pimcore Better Search

For efficient data maintenance it is mandatory to have an efficient search. This bundle is a drop-in replacement for Pimcore's default backend search. It offers a search experience like users know from popular web search engines.

It does not need any configuration nor external applications to be installed.

Problems with Pimcore's built-in search functionality

Pimcore provides an object search in

• global search
• relation field search (via looking glass icon)
• grid search

All of these places share the same underlying search engine and thus the same problems:

• by default (without MySQL's search operators) only word search is supported
  • e.g. searching product will not find a data object which only contains products
• terms with less than 3 characters get ignored (with MySQL's default innodb_ft_min_token_size setting)
  • e.g. searching for CD will never find anything
• there is no fuzzy search which searches tolerating typo errors
  • e.g. searching for produt will not find product
• there is no word-stemming
  • e.g. searching for shirts (plural) will not find an object which contains shirt
• sometimes order of search results is irritating
  • e.g. elements which contain the search term only once get listed higher than those which contain it multiple times
• search is unusable for languages which do not have word separators (like Chinese, Japanese)

What does the plugin do different?

This bundle uses TNT Search as underlying library. This library solves all above issues, as it:

• supports prefix and suffix search
• supports any word length
• implements fuzzy / typo-tolerant search
• implements word-stemming for many languages
• implements TF/IDF algorithm to better sort search results
• implements n-gram search
  • for use with languages like Chinese / Japanese which do not have word separators

The plugin works as a drop-in replacement for Pimcore's search features: In the user interface everything will look the same as with default Pimcore. Only the underlying indexing and search logic gets changed.

SQL mode

You can also add filter conditions via SQL by prepending your query with a /, e.g. /SKU IN (1234,2345,3456) will return exactly the 3 specified items. For grid searches this feature was available until Pimcore 10 but it never was for relation search. With this feature it is easy to add multiple items to a relation.

And for Pimcore >= 11, this also brings back the SQL filters in the grid.

Installation

Composer

To get the plugin code you have to buy the plugin or write an email to info@blackbit.de.

You then either get access to the bundle's Bitbucket repository or you get the plugin code as a zip file. Accessing the Bitbucket repository has the advantage that you will always see changes to the plugin in the pull requests and are able to update to a new version yourself - please visit this page if this sounds interesting to you - if it does, please send us the email address of your BitBucket account so we can allow access to the repository.

When we allow your account to access our repository, please add the repository to the composer.json in your Pimcore root folder (see Composer repositories):

"repositories": [
    {
        "type": "vcs",
        "url": "git@bitbucket.org:blackbitwerbung/pimcore-plugins-better-search"
    }
]

(Please add your public SSH key to your Bitbucket account for this to work)

Alternatively if you received the plugin code as zip file, please upload the zip file to your server - e.g. create a folder bundles in the Pimcore root folder) and add the following to your composer.json:

"repositories": [
    {
        "type": "artifact",
        "url": "./bundles/"
    }
]

Beware that when you put the zip directly in the Pimcore root folder, and add "url": "./" it will still work but Composer will scan all files under the Pimcore root recursively to find bundle zip files (incl. assets, versions etc) - which will take quite a long time.

Then you should be able to execute composer require blackbit/better-search (or composer update blackbit/better-search --with-dependencies for updates if you already have this bundle installed) from CLI.

At last you have to enable and install the plugin, either via browser UI or via CLI bin/console pimcore:bundle:enable BlackbitBetterSearchBundle && bin/console pimcore:bundle:install BlackbitBetterSearchBundle

You can always access the latest version by executing composer update blackbit/better-search --with-dependencies on CLI.

Recreate search index

By default during installation a background process will get started which indexes the data of all existing Pimcore elements.

Whenever an element gets saved, the search index gets updated (the same way as Pimcore does it by default).

To manually recreate the search index, you can execute the CLI command bin/console better-search:create-index