m-green/finder-frontend

Serves search pages for GOV.UK

Finder Frontend

Finder frontend renders search on GOV.UK.

Live examples

Site search

Site search is available from the header of every page.

Finder pages

Finder pages provide facetted searching over a collection of documents.

• gov.uk/aaib-reports
• gov.uk/cma-cases
• gov.uk/drug-safety-update
• gov.uk/drug-device-alerts
• gov.uk/government/case-studies
• gov.uk/government/groups
• gov.uk/government/people
• gov.uk/world/organisations
• gov.uk/international-development-funding
• gov.uk/maib-reports
• gov.uk/raib-reports

The advanced search finder provides facetted searching of GOV.UK taxonomy and content types:

• gov.uk/search/advanced?group=guidance_and_regulation&topic=%2Fmoney

Read more about the advanced search finder

Nomenclature

• Finder: Page containing a list of filterable documents and filters.
• Facets: Metadata associated with documents.
• Filters: Searchable/filterable metadata for example case_state={open|closed} for a CMA case.

Dependencies

• alphagov/static: provides static assets (JS/CSS) and provides the GOV.UK templates.
• alphagov/content-store: provides the content items for the finder itself -- containing the finder title, tagged organisations and related links
• alphagov/rummager: provides search results

Running the application

$ ./startup.sh

If you are using the GDS development virtual machine then the application will be available on the host at http://finder-frontend.dev.gov.uk/

Running the test suite

Before you can run the test suite you'll need the govuk-content-schemas repository locally. See lib/govuk_content_schema_examples.rb for more details.

The default rake task runs all the tests:

$ bundle exec rake

The application has jasmine tests, which can be accessed at /specs when the application is running in development mode. These are also run when rake, above, is run. To run JavaScript tests separately: bundle exec rake jasmine:test

Making a new finder

1. If required, add a schema to alphagov/rummager describing your document type -- example
2. Publish a Finder Content Item to the content store. See the doc for Finder Content Item for more info.
3. Ensure your documents are indexed in alphagov/rummager correctly.

Developing a finder locally

You can run this application with a local file so you can develop a finder without having to publish the content item to the publishing-api.

For example:

DEVELOPMENT_FINDER_JSON=features/fixtures/aaib_reports_example.json ./startup.sh --live

How to add a fixed filter

You can use gov.uk/api/search.json?filter_link= with the path of the page you looking for to migrate.

For example, you want to filter by the field link on /government/world/organisations You can access the following: https://www.gov.uk/api/search.json?filter_link=/government/world/organisations/british-antarctic-territory You will be able to see inside results the field format

You can double check the filter by performing the following search using rummager:

http://rummager.dev.gov.uk/search.json?filter_NAME=VALUE

For more information please refer to the search api documentation.

Adding a Q&A frontend to a finder

See the documentation on the Q&A frontend and how it relates to a finder.

Application structure

• No data store -- all data comes via the APIs mentioned above.
• app/models contains two kinds of object.
  1. Value objects used to wrap up responses from API calls.
  2. Facet objects which wrap up the behaviour of different types of facet -- eg radios, selects, etc.
• app/presenters contains objects which serialise the value objects to hashes for display via mustache.
• app/parsers contains objects which transform API responses into models.