We have a client requirement to have a page type which acts as a collection for multiple documents - one primary document (a PDF), and an arbitrary number of secondary documents (PDFs, DOCX/XLSX files, images). The documents are all stored in CMS as IContent. The clients want a search control on the page which can match against text in any of these documents, and return the parent page as the result. The individual files themselves should not be returned as search results. This doesn't need to be a site-wide search, and can be specific to the collection page type.
Is there any decent way to do this? We're on EPiServer 7.19/Find 8, and can't update at this stage.
I have a working-but-not-great solution, achieved by using Content Areas to hold the documents, and enabling IndexInContentAreas on the MediaData files. If I then use:
var results = SearchClient.Instance.Search<MyPageType>().For("Search Query").GetPagesResult();I get pages based on the text in these content areas - I've tested this with unique words in PDFs, and it definitely works. Great! Unfortunately, I can't see any way of communicating to the user why the match was made - I've tried creating highlights as per the documentation here, but this just returns an empty string, and there is no available excerpt for this search type.
My first guess was to use UnifiedSearch and grab the Excerpt and Highlight from there, but for whatever reason, UnifiedSearch does not match against words from the PDFs in content areas in the way conventional search does.
I've seen the documentation around attachments, but this is a bit abstract and I can't find an example of how this can be used as part of a Page, and whether it can accept IContent MediaData, or if it's meant solely for indexing binary content that sits outside of EPiServer's own media tree. Would I need to intercept the publish action for my page and create/update an instance of a POCO container class which links the page to the attachments for EPiServer Find to index?