Using Full-Text Search

Orchid provides full-text search capabilities through the Laravel Scout package. This package offers an abstraction for searching through your Eloquent models and requires that you specify the search driver that you will use for your application. These can be elasticsearch, algolia, sphinx, or other solutions.

To make your models searchable within the application, you must register them in the Orchid configuration file. You can do this by adding a new entry to the 'search’ array for each model you want to make searchable. For example:

'search' => [
    \App\Models\Idea::class,
],

This example uses presenters, it is highly recommended that you familiarize yourself with them. And also, take steps to configure the model from the documentation Laravel Scout.

The Presenter is used to display the search results, which calls the presenter() method of the model:

namespace App;

use App\Orchid\Presenters\IdeaPresenter;
use Laravel\Scout\Searchable;
use Illuminate\Database\Eloquent\Model;

class Idea extends Model
{
    use Searchable;

    /**
     * Get the presenter for the model.
     *
     * @return IdeaPresenter
     */
    public function presenter()
    {
        return new IdeaPresenter($this);
    }
    
    /**
     * Get the indexable data array for the model.
     *
     * @return array
     */
    public function toSearchableArray()
    {
        $array = $this->toArray();

        // Customize array...

        return $array;
    }
}

In the representatives, we indicate the Searchable interface and define methods that will return values for a display to the user, for example like this:

namespace App\Orchid\Presenters;

use Laravel\Scout\Builder;
use Orchid\Screen\Contracts\Searchable;
use Orchid\Support\Presenter;

class IdeaPresenter extends Presenter implements Searchable
{
    /**
     * @return string
     */
    public function label(): string
    {
        return 'Ideas';
    }

    /**
     * @return string
     */
    public function title(): string
    {
        return $this->entity->name;
    }

    /**
     * @return string
     */
    public function subTitle(): string
    {
        return 'Small descriptions';
    }

    /**
     * @return string
     */
    public function url(): string
    {
        return url('/');
    }

    /**
     * @return string
     */
    public function image(): ?string
    {
        return null;
    }
    
    /**
     * @param string|null $query
     *
     * @return Builder
     */
    public function searchQuery(string $query = null): Builder
    {
        return $this->entity->search($query);
    }
    
    /**
     * @return int
     */
    public function perSearchShow(): int
    {
        return 3;
    }
}

Customizing Search Queries

To customize search queries, you can override the default searchQuery() method. This method returns a Builder instance representing the query used to index the model.

public function searchQuery(string $query = null): Builder
{
    return $this->entity->search($query)->where('active', true);
}

Here, in the searchQuery() method, the where() method was used to limit the search to only active models