Search and filter

If you require more extensive search functionality in your website solution, you can integrate third-party search engines with Optimizely Content Management System (CMS).

Search for a page

The CMS SearchDataSource web control is a flexible web control that supports property searches, and you can apply different criteria to the search functionality.

Searching for pages often occurs through a Property-based search, which provides an efficient and powerful tool to retrieve pages based on any property values, typically of types other than string. From markup (or the visual design mode in Visual Studio), the CMS SearchDataSource web control supports this type of search.

From code-behind files, you also can call the FindPagesWithCriteria() method of the EPiServer.DataFactory class to perform property-based searches. The FindPagesWithCriteria method is used by the SearchDataSource control when you perform a property-based search.

From markup or visual design mode, add PropertyCriteria controls to the SearchDataSource tag. From code-behind files, create EPiServer.PropertyCriteria instances and insert them into a PropertyCriteriaCollection that is passed to FindPagesWithCriteria. You must add the SearchDataSource control's DataSourceID attribute to the control that renders the data.

Filter information

A filter is a general mechanism in CMS that manages and manipulates information in listings and collections of content (PageDataCollection, IContent). As a developer, you can construct your filters to use with listings to display content. Use a filter to add, remove, and sort.

The following most common built-in filter options are as follows:

• SortBy and SortDirection used to specify a custom property to sort on.
• SortOrder uses a predefined sorting from FilterSortOrder enum.
• MaxCount and SkipCount to limit the number of items.
• EnableVisibleInMenu, PageTypeID, and so on.
• LanguageBranches collection to limit the search.
• Criteria collection constrains the search result (used for property search or as filters).
• SelectParameters collection to set attribute values from other sources (Control, Cookie, Form, Profile, QueryString, Session, EPiServer Property).
• FilterForVisitor works with IEnumerable<IContent> and PageDataCollection.

CMS documents filter classes and enumerations in the EPiServer.Filters namespace. You can create filters by extending the EPiServer.Filters.IPageFilter class.