CODEWITHSUNDEEP
databasesearchmodulesitecoreweb-crawler
Gabbar
Gabbar

Reputation: 4066

Sitecore AdvancedDatabaseCrawler advantages/benefits

I tried using Sitecore.Search namespace and it seems to do basic stuff. I am now evaluating AdvancedDatabaseCrawler module by Alex Shyba. What are some of the advantages of using this module instead of writing my own crawler and search functions?

Thanks

Upvotes: 0

Views: 276

Answers (2)

Brian Pedersen
Brian Pedersen

Reputation: 1

First of all, the "old" way of acecssing the Lucene index was very simple, but unfortunately it's deprecated from Sitecore 6.5. The "new" way of accessing the Lucene index is very complex as the possibilities are endless. Alex Shyba's implementation is the missing part that makes it sensible to use the "new" way.

Take a look at this blog post: http://briancaos.wordpress.com/2011/10/12/using-the-sitecore-open-source-advanceddatabasecrawler-lucene-indexer/

It's a 3 part description on how to configure the AdvancedDatabaseCrawler, how to make a simple search and how to make a multi field search. Without Alex's AdvancedDatabaseCrawler, these tasks would take almost 100 lines of code. With the AdvancedDatabaseCrawler, it takes only 7 lines of code.

So if you are in need of an index solution, this is the solution to use.

Upvotes: 0

Mark Ursino
Mark Ursino

Reputation: 31435

Advantages:

  • You don't have to write anything.
  • It handles a lot of the code you need to write to even query Sitecore, e.g. basic search, basic search with field-level sorting, field-level searches, relation searches (GUID matches for lookup fields), multi-field searches, numeric range and date range searches, etc.
  • It handles combined searches, with logical operators
  • You can access the code.
  • This video shows samples of the code and front-end running various search types.

Disadvantages:

  • None that I can think of, because if you find an issue or a way to extend it, you have full access to the code and can amend it per your needs. I've done this before by creating the GetHashCode() and Equals() methods for the SkinnyItem class.

Upvotes: 2

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