Blacklight Autocomplete

Thanks to @flyingzumwalt for kicking off this documentation

Blacklight has a new feature in core which allows an application to use autocomplete in the search bar.

Note about Solr Compatibility

This feature is based on code that worked with Solr 4.x, but the feature itself has only been tested with Solr 5.

The Blacklight autocomplete feature does a few things behind the scenes:

• it defines a SuggestionController
• it defines a '/suggest' API endpoint on your application

This feature is configurable via the catalog_controller.rb in your application

# Configuration for autocomplete suggestor
config.autocomplete_enabled = true
config.autocomplete_path = 'suggest'

The /suggest API Endpoint will use data that indexed and exposed through /suggest SearchHandler.

Configure Solr to support suggestions

The default Blacklight schema.xml copies dynamic *_t and *_facet fields to the suggest field. *suggest is setup as a dynamic field of type textSuggest which contains a basic KeywordTokenizerFactory. This tokenizer factory, and the fields that are copied into it can be tweaked to modify your suggestions.

The /suggest request handler uses this factory by the defined search component dictionary mySuggester.

By default, the copied in fields will used in the autocomplete API.