Search API Autocomplete

This module adds autocomplete capabilities for Search API searches.

Autocompletion can be activated and configured for each search (all search views and pages) individually, so you have fine-grained control over where autocompletion can be used – and by whom.

For a full description of the module, visit the project page.

Submit bug reports and feature suggestions, or track changes in the issue queue.

Requirements

This module requires the following other module:

• Search API

Necessary server feature

The default “Retrieve from server” suggester provided by this module retrieves autocomplete suggestions from the server, based on the indexed data. For this to work, the server’s backend plugin has to support the search_api_autocomplete feature. Having autocompletion for indexes on servers for which the backend doesn’t support this feature is only possible if you use a different suggester (like “Display live results”, or one provided by a separate module). Most backends do support this feature, but please see the list in the Search API documentation for more up-to-date information on available backends and whether they support this feature.

Installation

After having installed and enabled the module (see the Drupal wiki for details), you have to do some administrative steps to activate the autocomplete functionality. Autocompletion can be enabled and configured for each search separately.

To activate autocompletion for an index’s searches, go to the index’s “Autocomplete” tab. There, you see all available searches for the index and can enable (and afterwards configure) autocompletion for each of them. All fulltext key fields on the searches should then become autocompletion fields.

There is an autocomplete permission for each separate search. Therefore, after adding autocomplete to a new search, don’t forget to set the appropriate permissions.

Supported searches

Currently, only search forms built by the Search API Pages or Views modules are supported directly. However, other modules can easily also use this functionality. See the “Information for developers” below for details.

Configuration

To customize the behavior of autocompletion for a specific search, go to the search index’s “Autocomplete” and click “Edit” next to the search in question.

Apart from this, there is also one global config setting not accessible via the user interface, only meant for advanced users:

• search_api_autocomplete.settings:enable_custom_scripts: Enables the “Use custom script” suggester which lets you redirect the autocomplete AJAX request to a path or URL of your choosing. Since this is mostly interesting for developers, who want to write their own autocomplete code (possibly bypassing Drupal for performance reasons), this suggester is not available otherwise by default. (The setting defaults to FALSE, set to TRUE to make the suggester available.)

Information for developers

Supporting a new method of creating suggestions

You can add your own implementation for creating autocomplete suggestions by creating a so-called “suggester” plugin. For details, see the interface documentation in src/Suggester/SuggesterPluginBase.php.

Supporting autocompletion with a backend plugin

To support autocompletion with a backend plugin, the plugin has to support the search_api_autocomplete feature. This will necessitate the backend class to have a getAutocompleteSuggestions() method as detailed in the interface in src/AutocompleteBackendInterface.php.

Supporting autocompletion on a search form

If you have a search form not generated by the Search views or Search pages modules, you can add an autocomplete search plugin to support autocompletion for it. See src/Search/SearchPluginBase.php for the plugin type documentation, or src/Plugin/search_api_autocomplete/search/ for examples. Additionally, you will need to write a form alter hook to adapt your search form’s input element. For examples, see search_api_autocomplete_form_views_exposed_form_alter() or search_api_autocomplete_form_search_api_page_block_form_alter().

Maintainers

• Thomas Seidl (drunken monkey)