Hello again DNN Creative community. I have yet another question.

On my particular website, I am planning to end up with both an Active forums installation running and a full Smith Cart e-commerce installation running. My question is this.

Active forums has a built in search module, Smith Cart has a built in search for products, DNN has IT'S built in search as well. Is it possible to have a single master search bar, which has access to data from all three sources for it's results?

-Alex

This isn't an answer but ...

Active Forums and Active Social are being integrated into DotNetNuke. I would expect to see that extend to search. The release is due (I think) in the summer/fall period.

As for Smith Cart, I think that a question to them is in order. If you get an answer, please report it back here too.

Will do Joseph. I'll let you know my findings.

Ok, I've got a few answers from smith consulting. Here it comes.

Hi Alex,

Currently there are 3 different ways to search for products in your store.
The first being the DNN iSearchable interface so all your products are indexed and searchable using the regular DNN search facility.
The product search within the BuyNow module itself.
The last would be the Smith Search module which is a separate module in Smith Cart that can be placed in any pane on any page in your portal and allows the user to search and quickly locate products in your catalog.When the user enters/selects their search options and clicks “Search” the search module will query the category and product tables and the user will be redirected to the BuyNow module product listing page and the products will be filtered according to the search criteria entered in the search module. If a search returns no rows then the search module will display a message “No records found” and remain on the same page.
For options 2 and 3 above, Smith Cart also provides the ability to enter additional product search keys that are searchable from the product listing page search box. This is useful if you would like to have products searchable on words that do not show up in the product name, sku, summary or description or they can be used for product associations or common misspellings.

Thanks,
Kevin Carlson
Tech Support





Joined: 12/18/2009
Posts: 165
Re: How to tie together Smith Cart search and DNN search
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The fundamental problem is the context and interpretation of the search. SmithCart does not handle DNN results, and vice versa.

The search domain of SmithCart is limited to products or limited to a selected category. With SmitCart, only a single search term is processed, either one word or an exact match of multiple words. DNN will search the entire site for with multiple search terms (default OR), and can use prefixes for Boolean logic (minus sign means NOT or exclude).

Consider these examples: Search text (ui domain) -> interpretation within domain

Shirt
(dropdown=All)
SC -> shirt in Products.All
DNN -> shirt in Content.All

Shirt
(drop down=PANTS)
SC -> shirt in Products.Pants (only)
DN -> Shirt in Content.All

Shirt
(selected category=PANTS)
SC-> shirt in Products.All
DNN -> shirt in Content.All

Dress Red
(All)
SC -> "dress red" in Products.All (will not find "dress red")
DNN -> "red OR dress" in Content.All (will find any dress or red)

Dress -Red
(All)
SC -> "dress -red" in Products.All (most likely no results)
DNN -> "dress NOT red" in Content.All (further reduce results)

+Dress +Red
SC -> "+red +dress" in Products.All (most likely no results)
DNN -> "dress AND red" in Content.All (further reduce results)

iSearchable and search relevance scores
http://www.dotnetnuke.com/Resources/B...

If anyone has some suggestions to help resolve this problem, I know I would be very interested.