Java Web App Universal Search GUI Control

Question

I recently saw a demo of a .NET 3.5 product, which has a "Universal Search" widget ... ie, it allowed you to search their entire product, for either your own strings, or their strings, and the results were context-sensitive links to different parts of the application.

For example, let's say this was a Point of Sale system, you could search it for "Burger" and find:

• Employee "John Burgers"
• Menu Items "CheeseBurger", and "Burger"
• Report "Burger Sales"
• Etc...

It was a pretty neat "one search box to rule them all" type control.

We'd love to throw something similar in our product, which is a Java web-app ... just not even sure where to start. Any ideas?

Answer 1

Hmm, one idea comes to mind. For various categories in your product have a "search agent". e.g. Lets say you have following categories (or modules) in your app:

• Preferences
• People (both people and company)
• Reporting
• Tags (This is a good option to for searching. Tag most entities in your app)

Each of these will have a search agent. These search agents will register with the universal search widget's backend (You can have an options on where to search. This panel will show when the user clicks on advanced search. By default the search will be "entire app")

Upon the search the widget will ask each of these to search in their own category and then collate the results.

Of course there could be other ideas. This is just one of them. You will have to think about its pros and cons, like how will it impact your DB, etc.