Can nested collection lists be searchable via site search?

Hi -

I was wondering if I’ve just missed something.

My project (a community theatre website) has two collection lists:

  1. Plays
  2. Play Casts

The Plays collection has a multi-reference field linked to Play Casts, so that each play can have Cast Members (individuals) associated with it.

The collection items are rendered as a “Play Template” page, one collection item (“Play”) per page, based on URL.

I can use Site Search to locate a “Play” and view its discrete collection page, but Site Search doesn’t seem to find a specific Collection Item in “Play Casts” associated with the parent “Play.”

Does that even make sense?

And if it does, is there something I’m missing? For instance, if 5 different “Plays” collection items have “John Doe” as a nested collection item associated with it, is there a way for Site search to find the value “John Doe” and return all the “Plays” collection pages that have John Doe associated with them?

TIA,

Jonny


Here is my public share link: stgplays

Hi @jonnymay, thanks for the questions about the site search capability.

Site search uses a full text indexing of all the pages on the site and whatever rendered content is published to the site will be indexed with the exception of excluded content that has been excluded manually in element settings.

The returned results will be links to the articles where the searched for text appears with the first items shown in the search result have the most relevance.

There would not be separate links to nested link content, however if the links contained text that you are searching for, if those appear on the published pages, those links would appear in other items found the site pages/collections.

Note that indexing is not done immediately after a cms update, on CMS and Standard Ecommerce Hosting, manual reindexing is available once every 24 hours. On higher hosting tiers, manual reindexing is available once every hour.

If you are searching for Play Casts, there may not be a result unless you are searching for text that appears and is published in the play casts collection, i.e. a cast member name.

In one of the articles for example, I see a cast member by name of “Chris Thurman”. If I search on that name, I get a list of show casts items where that person is mentioned:

Shared with CloudApp

Does this help?

Hi Dave, thanks for the answer.

I am seeing the results you indicate. However what I would HOPE to get was a list of Play collection items that include, in this example, Chris Thurman. The results shown simply link to the Play Casts collection directly. :man_shrugging:

J

Hi @jonnymay, I would probably adjust your search result length, right now it will only show the first 10 items, so it will give precedence first to direct items having that name in the title, then list other items in other collections.

Right now, it shows the first 10 only because of the length setting:

Shared with CloudApp

I might increase the number of search results to 50 or 100 then republish and check if you still do not see any matching items.

You could also exclude the Show Casts collection content to only match info from the Plays collection to reduce the search result set.

Awesome, I hadn’t seen this setting. Alas, though, it doesn’t move and only allows me to have a setting of 10.

Hi @jonnymay, I am checking on the limit for the search results, to see why that cannot be changed.

In the meantime, I checked and it seems the site was just published not too long ago, now I am seeing different search results on that item Chris Thurman, now there are plays showing up in the search results:

Shared with CloudApp

Are you able to find your search results on your end?