Search collections by keyword of various collection types simultaneously?

Design help CMS
1

I’m trying to learn how to build a page that shows search results for my collections. For example, if someone types “hello” into a search bar, i want a page that shows all the collections of several different collection types that have the word “hello” in at least one of their text fields.

So if I have a few collections like Product, Region, Article etc… Can I perform a search implied by this SQL statement?


SELECT * FROM (
  (SELECT product_name as name, 'product', page_url FROM Product WHERE product_name LIKE '%hello%' OR description LIKE '%hello%')
  UNION
  (SELECT region_name as name, 'region', page_url FROM Region WHERE area LIKE '%hello%')
  UNION
  (SELECT title as name, 'article', page_url FROM Article WHERE title LIKE '%hello%' OR description LIKE '%hello%' OR excerpt LIKE '%hello%')
  ...etc...
) ORDER BY Name

Then in my designer use a collection list to iterate through the results and let people click through to the page_url? Or if webflow has a component dedicated for this kind of search behaviour?

this earlier posts suggests it is possible: CMS Collection Search directly on site

But it is froma few years ago, so not sure if it is still relevant. And it says it’s a client side solution? So if I have more than 10k products, regions, articles etc.. combined, that would be a burden on web browsers right?

2

Look into Finsweet’s libs, specifically-

  • FS CMS Load for longer list loading and segmentation options
  • FS CMS Combine to merge them
  • FS CMS Filter to filter the combined loaded list
  • FS CMS Sort if you want to sort the combined list a specific way, e.g. by Name across the collections.

Everything will work automatically as wired, however you might need a custom script to trigger the sorting to your default Name asc setup.

Yes it’s client side.

If you really needed this with more than 10K items, look into Jetboost, which is a paid solution, and the company was recently sold. Not sure how it would handle multi-collection merging, but it can do the filtering server-side.

Otherwise, you’re using your own programmed solution, e.g. Supabase for storage, serverless function for query endpoints, a reverse proxy or Xano for merging the HTML into your site template.