Search Essentials search-essentials

Overview overview

The search feature is an essential feature of Adobe Experience Manager (AEM) Communities. In addition to the AEM platform search capabilities, AEM Communities provides the UGC search API for searching user-generated content (UGC). UGC has unique properties as it is entered and stored separately from other AEM content and user data.

For Communities, the two things generally searched are:

This section of the documentation is of interest to developers who are creating custom components that create or manage UGC.

Security and Shadow Nodes security-and-shadow-nodes

For a custom component, it is necessary to use the SocialResourceUtilities methods. The utility methods that create and search for UGC establish the required shadow nodes and ensure that the member has the correct permissions for the request.

What is not managed through the SRP utilities are properties related to moderation.

See SRP and UGC Essentials for information regarding utility methods used to access UGC and ACL shadow nodes.

UGC Search API ugc-search-api

The UGC common store is provided by one of various storage resource providers (SRPs), each possibly having a different native query language. Therefore, regardless of the SRP chosen, custom code should use methods from the UGC API package (com.adobe.cq.social.ugc.api) which invokes the query language appropriate for the chosen SRP.

ASRP Searches asrp-searches

For ASRP, UGC is stored in the Adobe cloud. While UGC is not visible in CRX, moderation is available from both the author and Publish environments. The use of the UGC search API works for ASRP the same as for other SRPs.

Tools do not currently exist for managing ASRP searches.

When creating custom properties that are searchable, it is necessary to adhere to the naming requirements.

MSRP Searches msrp-searches

For MSRP, UGC is stored in MongoDB configured to use Solr for searching. UGC is not visible in CRX, but moderation is available from both the author and Publish environments.

Regarding MSRP and Solr:

Custom search features should use the UGC search API.

When creating custom properties that are searchable, it is necessary to adhere to the naming requirements.

JSRP Searches jsrp-searches

For JSRP, UGC is stored in Oak and is visible only in the repository of the AEM Author or Publish instance on which it was entered.

Since UGC is typically entered in the Publish environment, for multi-publisher production systems, it is necessary to configure a publish cluster, not a publish farm, so that the entered content is visible from all publishers.

For JSRP, UGC entered in the Publish environment is never visible in the author environment. Therefore, all moderation tasks take place in the Publish environment.

Custom search features should use the UGC search API.

Oak Indexing oak-indexing

While Oak indexes are not automatically created for the AEM platform search, as of AEM 6.2, they have been added for AEM Communities to improve performance and give support for pagination when presenting UGC search results.

If custom properties are in use and searches are slow, then additional indexes must be created for the custom properties to make them more performant. To maintain portability, adhere to the naming requirements when creating custom properties that are searchable.

To modify existing indexes or create custom indexes, see Oak Queries and Indexing.

The Oak Index Manager is available from ACS AEM Commons. It provides:

To view the existing Oak indexes in CRXDE Lite, the location is:

Indexed Search Properties indexed-search-properties

Default Search Properties default-search-properties

The following are some of the searchable properties used for various Communities features:

Naming of Custom Properties naming-of-custom-properties

When adding custom properties, for those properties to be visible to sorts and searches created with the UGC search API, it is required to add a suffix to the property name.

The suffix is for query languages which use a schema:

Solr is an example of a query language which uses a schema.

Notes:

Filters filters

Components, which include the comment system, support the filter parameter in addition to their endpoints.

The filter syntax for AND and OR logic is expressed as follows (shown before being URL encoded):

The default implementation of the Search component uses this syntax as can be seen in the URL that opens the Search Results page in the Community Components guide. To experiment, browse to http://localhost:4503/content/community-components/en/search.html.

Filter operators are:

It is important that the URL references the Communities component (resource) and not the page on which the component is placed:

SRP Tools srp-tools

There is an Adobe Experience Cloud GitHub project which contains:

AEM Communities SRP Tools

This repository contains tools for managing data in SRP.

Currently, there is one servlet that can delete all UGC from any SRP.

For example, to delete all UGC in ASRP:

curl -X POST http://localhost:4502/services/social/srp/cleanup?path=/content/usergenerated/asi/cloud -uadmin:admin

Troubleshooting troubleshooting

Solr Query solr-query

To help troubleshoot problems with a Solr query, enable DEBUG logging for

com.adobe.cq.social.srp.impl.SocialSolrConnector.

The actual Solr query is displayed URL encoded in the debug log:

Query to solr is: sort=timestamp+desc&bl=en&pl=en&start=0&rows=10 &q=%2Btitle_t:(hello)+%2Bprovider_id:\/content/usergenerated/asi/mongo/content/+%2Bresource_type_s:&df=provider_id&trf=verbatim&fq={!cost%3D100}report_suite:mongo

The value of the q parameter is the query. Once the URL encoding is decoded, the query can be passed to the Solr Admin Query tool for further debugging.

Related Resources related-resources