Version 6 pre-stable
This version of Silverstripe CMS has not yet been given a stable release. See the release roadmap for more information. Go to documentation for the most recent stable version.

FulltextSearchable

Fulltext search allows advanced search criteria for searching words within a text based data column. While basic Fulltext search can be achieved using the built-in MySQLDatabase class a more powerful wrapper for Fulltext search is provided through a module.

See the FulltextSearch Module. This module provides a high level wrapper for running advanced search services such as Solr, Lucene or Sphinx in the backend rather than MySQL search.

Adding fulltext support to MySQLDatabase

The MySQLDatabase class defaults to creating tables using the InnoDB storage engine. As Fulltext search in MySQL requires the MyISAM storage engine, any DataObject you wish to use with Fulltext search must be changed to use MyISAM storage engine.

You can do so by adding this static variable to your class definition:

namespace App\Model;

use SilverStripe\ORM\Connect\MySQLSchemaManager;
use SilverStripe\ORM\DataObject;

class MyDataObject extends DataObject
{
    private static $create_table_options = [
        MySQLSchemaManager::ID => 'ENGINE=MyISAM',
    ];
}

The FulltextSearchable extension will add the correct Fulltext indexes to the data model.

The SearchForm and FulltextSearchable API's are currently hard coded to be specific to Page and File records and cannot easily be adapted to include custom DataObject instances. To include your custom objects in the default site search, have a look at those extensions and modify as required.

Fulltext filter

Silverstripe CMS provides a FulltextFilter which you can use to perform custom fulltext searches on DataLists.

Example DataObject:

namespace App\Model;

use SilverStripe\ORM\Connect\MySQLSchemaManager;
use SilverStripe\ORM\DataObject;

class SearchableDataObject extends DataObject
{
    private static $db = [
        'Title' => 'Varchar(255)',
        'Content' => 'HTMLText',
    ];

    private static $indexes = [
        'SearchFields' => [
            'type' => 'fulltext',
            'columns' => ['Title', 'Content'],
        ],
    ];

    private static $create_table_options = [
        MySQLSchemaManager::ID => 'ENGINE=MyISAM',
    ];
}

Performing the search:

use App\Model\SearchableDataOBject;

SearchableDataObject::get()->filter('SearchFields:Fulltext', 'search term');

If your search index is a single field size, then you may also specify the search filter by the name of the field instead of the index.

API documentation