Description

The quick (live) search available on the top right corner of the page is lagging behind in terms on look & feel and user interaction:

• Look & Feel problems:
  • the way the search results are displayed is not consistent with the rest of the UI (Bootstrap)
  • it's not responsive (XWIKI-11062)
  • it doesn't use the Icon Theme (XWIKI-15115)
  • too many categories (Page title, Page content, Attachment name, Attachment content)
• User interaction problems:
  • it's not accessible (XWIKI-16140)
  • missing keyboard navigation
  • the search results popup hides too quickly
• Search results problems:
  • inconsistency between quick search and search page results (XWIKI-13531)
    • the quick search doesn't use the main search page configuration (e.g. Main.SolrSearchConfig)
  • it's not easy to search for partial text (XWIKI-14596)
  • when matching pages, it doesn't look in objects (page metadata), but only in page title and page content (XWIKI-14184)
  • the order of the results doesn't match their relevance (XWIKI-15292)
  • you can't view all the results for a given category (only the top 3)
  • you get only 3 results in a given category even if the rest of the categories don't have any matches
• Configuration problems:
  • there's no easy way to add custom search sources (i.e. provided by an extension)
  • you cannot reorder the search sources and there's no priority between them (XWIKI-11481)
  • you may need to clear the browser cache after changing the configuration (XWIKI-11053)

Proposal

Here are some actions that we could take in order to improve the quick search:

1. Revise the list of search sources we provide by default. The following should be more than enough by default:
   • Pages (merge the "Page title" and "Page content" sources and also add support for matching page metadata, i.e. objects); the results provided by this source should be very similar to the ones you get on the main search page
   • Attachments (merge the "Attachment name" and "Attachment content" sources)
   • Users
   • Wikis
2. Enable prefix search by using the __INPUT__ __INPUT__* query (the workaround from XWIKI-14596)
   • Prefix search using wildcard is not a problem for Solr (see https://medium.com/walkme-engineering/solr-from-the-field-365204108067#746e ). The problem is with suffix (*foo) and contains (*foo*) wildcard searches, but there haven't been many requests for this and I think most of the users are expecting a prefix search on the quick search.
   • By duplicating the query we ensure that we still perform a word-based search (using stemming, lemmatization and locale specific processing), which are disabled when wildcards are used.
3. Make the UI consistent by using a Bootstrap dropdown to display the results

   

   1. This should make it responsive and the dropdown will hide only when clicking outside or when using the Escape key
   2. Use the Icon Theme
   3. Make it accessible
   4. Add keyboard navigation (Up / Down arrows)
4. Show more results in one category if the others don't have matches (basically use the "free" slots from the other categories; e.g. show 6 pages if there are no attachment matches)
5. Introduce a keyboard shortcut for quick search (that expands the quick search input and gives the focus)
6. Make the list of search sources extensible by converting the XWiki.SearchSuggestSourceClass into a component (implement a WikiBaseObjectComponentBuilder)
   • Add scope and priority properties to XWiki.SearchSuggestSourceClass
   • Retrieve the list of search sources asynchronously after the page load
7. Add links to view all the results for each category (search source)
   1. Modify the main search page to be able to use a predefined search source (the link from the quick search to view all results would pre-select this source)
   2. Modify the quick search to use the same default (Solr) configuration as the main search
   3. Use the "Pages" search source by default on the main page
8. Try to reorder the categories (search sources) dynamically based on the scores (e.g. if the Users results have a higher scope than the Pages results then show the Users category first)
9. Unify / merge the Jump to Page feature with Quick Search. There's no point in maintaining both when they do almost the same thing.