Find Bar

The Find Bar is the heart of the Magnolia user interface. It is the central starting point for all your tasks: search through content across apps, open apps and access items directly. The Find Bar searches and adapts its results in real time as you type. It offers full-text search and precise filters for you to make the most of your content. You can plug in any REST-compliant data source to be able to search through content that is not stored in Magnolia too.

Extend your search

Full-text search across all content

The Find Bar allows you to search across all content search inside and outside Magnolia (federated search, enterprise search). The search covers all Magnolia and custom content apps, assets and pages. Developers can integrate external datasets using the API.

Start typing in the Find Bar to see search results adapt in real time to keywords. Results are pre-sorted by app as well as type of content (e.g. app, page, story, asset or tour).

Use the Up and Down arrow keys to move through search results. Press Enter to open the highlighted result.

The Find Bar automatically recognizes any command you enter.

Find bar

Full-text search in chooser dialogs

Since Magnolia 6.2.6, full-text search is also possible in chooser dialogs of apps that use the JCR data source:

Full-text search in chooser dialogs

Currently, only a single JCR workspace can be searched.

Search for a specific path

Since Magnolia 6.2.2, you can use the Find Bar to search for a specific path. This allows you to reach a target node more quickly than by checking an app’s node tree or by browsing search results supplied for a less specific keyword or phrase.

Searching for a specific path

Search external content sources

You can use the Find Bar to search not only through all your Magnolia content but also through content stored in external data sources. To do so, developers can build custom search result suppliers extending the Find Bar’s capabilities using a purpose-built API. The API facilitates integration with any outside source such as assets stored on Flickr or your client data in a CRM application.

Through REST

For configuration properties and an example showing how to configure a REST-based search result supplier, see REST search result suppliers for Periscope.

Filter search results

You can use multiple parallel filters to quickly narrow down your search results and find exactly what you are looking for without scrolling through dozens of results.

Filtering search results

You can easily remove or refine the filter by type, tags (DX Core), latest editor or the date the content was last edited.

The Type filter lists all types of content that have been configured for search. By default, this includes all JCR content apps. External data sources can also be configured.

In the Tags filter, you can search through all the tags applied to your content in Magnolia.

Tags filter search

If you use the Magnolia Image Recognition module, all automatically generated tags applied to your assets will be available here.

If you start searching while having an open app, Magnolia will automatically filter results based on the current app so you can get relevant results straight away.

Role-based results

The search results the Find Bar returns are relevant for each user. Admins can refine your search results based on your user role in Magnolia.

If you do not have access to the Assets app, for example, you will not get results from that app.

Intelligent image recognition

Search beyond text with the help of the Image Recognition module.

The Image Recognition module analyzes your assets and automatically tags them with content tags. The tags populate the Tags filter in the Find Bar, making your visual data searchable without requiring any time-consuming human intervention.

For example, an image automatically tagged as lion will be returned as a result if you search for lion in the Find Bar even if the image’s file name and metadata do not contain the word lion.

Configuring the Find Bar

You can configure how many search results are displayed.

To do so:

  1. Open the Resource Files app.

  2. Go to the config.yaml file under the admincentral folder.
    Resource Files app

  3. Edit the file and update the properties that you want to change. For example, update defaultCountPerSupplier to 20 if you want to see up to 20 search results.
    Updating the search results display

  4. Save your changes.

Configurable properties

In the table below are listed properties in the Admincentral module that affect the showing of search results.

Table 1. Subset of findBar properties
Property Description

defaultCountPerSupplier

optional, default is 10

Integer defining the maximum number of search results shown from any single search supplier.

editorRoles

optional

List of user roles allowed in the Last editor search filter:
List of authorized user roles

All users are available unless specified otherwise.

By allowing all user roles in editorRoles, you may experience performance issues, especially when a large number of public users are registered in a shared user repository on the author instance and you open a Find Bar filter.

minimumSearchLength

optional, default is 3

Configure the minimum number of necessary characters that are shown in a text hint in the find bar to help the user understand how to use the search feature.
Findbar with text hint

suppliers

optional

List of search result suppliers. If undefined, it defaults to all suppliers provided by the Periscope module.

supplierOrder

optional, default is apps, pages, stories, assets, tours

List defining the ordering of search result groups.

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