I am working on an Orchard CMS system that is hosted in Azure. However, using the inbuilt Lucene search it has proved difficult to implement a search algorithm that filters out documents that are links to files (e.g. PDF/Images) and filtering out documents that do not belong to certain taxonomies have are associated in a certain lat/long square, date/time of occurrence. To get an idea of the data that I am dealing with, the website is https://ahdb.org.uk/. Consequently, I am looking into implementing Azure Search to index and provide the search functionality for the site. Just so that you know the version of Orchard that is installed is 1.10.1.0.
I have searched the web to the best of my ability and there seems to be nothing out there.
Graham Harris
While there's no direct integration of Orchard with Azure Cognitive Search, it should still be possible with a little work. It looks like you have custom rules about what you need to index. You might need to create a custom database view that normalizes the data and is specific about your use case, and then feed that into the Azure Search pipeline. The Orchard 1.x schema is very relational, and will require some understanding of how parts and content items are related, as well as how versioning is implemented. A good way to do that is to install the miniprofiler module and look at some of the queries being generated by Orchard itself as it's doing similar tasks (such as a projection of data that looks like what you want to feed into search).
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My company is upgrading our database hardware to facilitate a data process that potentially may not work (... long story) and in order to somewhat justify the purchase in case the data process does not work, the idea has been floated around of rewriting the site using Oracle APEX. I am wondering about the limitations of APEX and have been unable to find a solution to a few questions.
I currently have a fairly complex, dynamic ecommerce website written in NodeJS and ExpressJS using EJS for templating. There is a lot of logic done inside the .ejs files and the partial templates themselves are re-used in various places throughout the site. We are using ORDS calls from the Node server to retreive data from the database.
I am mainly curious about how one would go about implementing something similar to EJS partial views in APEX. I am pretty new to APEX (2-3 months working on another application) so I haven't gotten too in depth into the way templates are used, past the normal #REGION_01# substitution of simple elements.
I am assuming that most of the logic (deciding whether to show element A or element B based on a value from the database record of the product) would be done in PL/SQL or in a separate JS file.
Is something like the following possible?
A template containing a "Add To Cart" Button, MSRP, Sale Price, and a (HTML) table displaying possible discounts based on the quantity purchased
A template containing product information, like the product ID, name, manufacturer, and a small description of the product
A template combining the previous 2 options and a picture of the product into a row that can be re-used across the site
If someone has experience with this sort of thing, or could point me towards some good reference material on a similar topic, I would appreciate it.
I've been working with Oracle APEX for a while, specially in the front-end department because it does lack a bit in regards templates.
To answer your question. It depends on what you mean by template
If templates are the apex template objects
You can create and customize templates on Shared Components -> Templates. I'm almost sure you need to create new stuff or duplicate because the vanilla ones are locked.
Another option is to create plugins for you app which will function similarly and can be exported/shared with other projects and people.
If Template is just a page that you will keep changing the record displayed
Sure, you can create many things using the a blank page and adding the components. I've on teams developing ERPs, Mobile Apps, Stock Integration with Marketplaces (needed some Java, though) and several custom made Application that are not available out-of-the-box.
I'm trying to find a better way to organize a huge mass of documents on SharePoint 2013. I've done a lot of searching and I thought that Enterprise Metadata would be my solution but I have yet to find a good way to harness it. I fell like there must be a solution to what I need built into to SharePoint already.
I want to give each document a "tag" or Enterprise Metadata Keyword and then have a document library that only displays files that are associated with a specific keyword. Any ideas?
Thanks!
I'd suggest some built-in SharePoint document library features to consider to start with, before looking at any third-party offerings.
For a document library, (via the settings for the document library), you can enable Metadata Navigation Settings - this can allow a user to filter list items based on metadata fields. This may offer something along the lines of what you described. I'd advise caution for large lists though.
Another option would be to look at creating or amending views for the library - the options are found on the Library tab of the ribbon. You can setup some filtering or aggregration for the view.
There is also the option, if appropriate to make certain views only available at specific locations within the document library - set via the per-location view settings
We are currently using a number of open source and commercial products to store different type of information (in our internal network). All these products come with their own repositories (usually a database) and their own search capabilities and store different type of information.
Currently the list of products is as follows:
Wordpress
Jira
Confluence
Sharepoint
Dynamics AX
Moodle
The problem we are facing is that when one needs to search for information, one needs to login into all these different systems and execute a search on each one.
I Googled for "search engine frontend", "meta search engine", etc. but i was not able to find something obvious that solves our problem. At this point, i have to say that we are not interested in building one "central repository" to be searched, but instead we are in need of a frontend that will accept the query from the user, "package it" to the format that each of the individual search engines understand, receive the respone (JSON or XML) and present it to the user
Any suggestions on how we could solve it?
Your strategy is right: If you are not interested in building a central index, you will need an application that accepts the query from the user, converts it to the format that each of the individual search engines understand, receives the responses and presents them to the user. This is exactly what a meta search engine does. Even if you use a framework (e.g. Carrot2), much work will probably remain to write those query and result transformers, and you will probably experience slow results because the meta search can never be faster than the underlying search modules of the components you search through.
Instead of querying each backend separately you can put your data into one backend.
You could export your data to a Apache Solr server and use a frontend like CorePages, http://www.corepages.biz . You could add a backlink to your data so you can directly jump to your search result entry, f. e. a Jira Ticket or a wiki article.
We use SharePoint 2007 and have set up a web application with several site collections. One for each of our clients. We'd like to synchronize content in all of the site collections. Maybe having a central repository, then all other site collections get content from here.
I was looking at Lightning Tools Conductor web part and seems a pretty good solution. However, I'm wondering if this can also be possible using the Content Deployment feature to copy a site from the central repository to all other site collections.
I do not advice you to copy and thus duplicate the information from your central repository to the other site collections. You'll lose precious disk space, performance and scalability.
If you have content that is created in a common site collection, you should either use the built-in web services or create dedicated ones to retrieve the content within the targeted site collections.
I usually create cross site collection look-up fields that allows a contributor to pick an entity from my central repository in a visual way and apply the rendering of the content once the page is in view mode.
That might not suit every need but I don't think content duplication is a wiser choice.
Edit : re-reading your question, is there a specific reason why you want to copy a complete site (spweb I guess) rather than specific content inside ?
I've built a web part for Sharepoint that retrieves data from an external service. I'd like to display the items in a way that's UI-compatible with Sharepoint (fits in with its surroundings.)
I'm aware of the "DataFormWebPart" but was unable to get one working properly. It requires a valid DataSource and I was unable to build one from the results of a web service call... Part of the problem is that my web service wrappers don't expose the XML return info, rather I have a bunch of deserialized objects. There doesn't seem to be an easy way to turn actual objects into a datasource, or populate a "generic" datasource from object data.
I could use an SPGridView to get the same UI, but the grid control doesn't have much in the way of smarts -and- it forces every field into its own column. I'd prefer to render each list item as a single cell with complex rendering (for instance the way that StackOverflow shows its lists of questions.) I'd also like to get as much of the Sharepoint-standard UI as possible, such as the sorting, filtering, and paging controls.
So, first: Has anyone here written a Sharepoint control that does this, and if so do you have sample code to share? If not: am I overlooking some useful control, whether MS-supplied or available in an external library?
Thanks!
Steve
Sharepoint: Best way to display lists
of non-Sharepoint content with
“compatible” UI?
Take a look at the built in sharepoint web controls:
Microsoft.SharePoint.WebControls Namespace
It contains all the controls used in sharepoint. I'd tell you more, but the documentation is very thorough.
Problem with SharePoint is that there are a bunch of different ways to do this. If your data is not changing too often and is not overly large it may be worth considering entering it into a list for display.
If you have the Enterprise licence it may be worth getting your data into the BDC and using it there.
you may have to convert the objects into xml or use the serialised objects with the XML webpart for display. This still has the issue of custom rendering using XSLT.
Here's a great article that explains how to configure BDC connections to web services using the BDC Definition Editor:
Creating a Web Service Connection by Using the Business Data Catalog Definition Editor
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb737887.aspx
The best way to do this IMO is to make a Web Part. As a Web Part the UI will be automatically rendered to be the same as the theme the site is using (unless you override it) and it will be able to be placed anywhere by anyone with admin privileges.
Tutorial on making a Web Part
Tutorial on packaging and deploying a Web Part
Example Web Part Source Code
You could create a custom web part and use an SPGridView. You say you don't like it, because it forces every field into its own column, but that's not true. You can create a template (ITemplate) for every column and fully customize what's shown inside it, just like you would using a normal ASP.Net GridView. Using this approach I've added the little "New" images right next to a list item's Title, just like SharePoint does itself.