Investigate Advanced search

[anarchivist]

Acceptance criteria

• Provide documentation about how to install/configure the Blacklight Advanced Search plugin
• For the demo site, include a configured advanced search setup, including "all fields", "names", "subjects", "places," and "titles"

[mejackreed]

Will require some updates to the upstream plugin

[anarchivist]

First round of work:

• Estimate the level of effort necessary to update the upstream plugin

[drh-stanford]

Talked to @mejackreed about this ticket. I will look into what changes are needed to the plugin for compatibility with Blacklight master, and what configuration changes would be needed for ArcLight.

An example of the plugin in use is SearchWorks -- https://searchworks.stanford.edu/advanced

[drh-stanford]

Here's a list of problems that I found that we'd need to fix -- the first 2 I've done locally but the rest I haven't tried:

1. blacklight needs a PR to fix the label_for_search_field method (see use correct local variable for label_for_search_field and sort_field_label blacklight#1713)
2. blacklight_advanced_search needs PRs to fix: (see projectblacklight/blacklight_advanced_search@master...drh-stanford:blacklight7)
   1. replacing search_field_def_for_key with blacklight_config.search_fields[key]
   2. replacing solr_field with field_name in the view for facet limits
   3. using Blacklight::SearchService.new(blacklight_config, params) for the search service in the advanced controller
3. PRs to make blacklight_range_limit work with blacklight_advanced_search. I had to remove the range limit plugin to get the advanced search to work
4. Alter the configuration so we have only the fields we want in the advanced search UI
5. testing the various combinations for the Advanced search UI -- I only did a few
6. any UI customization that we want to do -- I didn't see a mockup for the advanced search screen

Default advanced search screen

[drh-stanford]

• Add documentation on the Wiki for those interested in this adv search.

See https://github.com/sul-dlss/arclight/wiki/Upgrading-your-ArcLight-application#integrating-advanced-search

[seanaery]

Blacklight 8 has a built-in native Advanced Search, so this is kind of already done: https://arclight-demo.projectblacklight.org/catalog/advanced. Adding some documentation and/or a link in the ArcLight UI to get to it would be a reasonably small task.

[seanaery]

Turns out adding Advanced Search to ArcLight (or any other Blacklight application) is not yet straightforward. There is a bug in Solr affecting versions 7.3 and up that prevents the built-in features from working without implementing some workarounds, per:
https://github.com/projectblacklight/blacklight/wiki/Advanced-Search#configuration

As for this "investigate" ticket, perhaps we can treat this as done. Depending on how the team would like to proceed, we could potentially spawn a couple followup tickets, i.e.:

• Make config.advanced_search.enabled = true actually render an Advanced link in the ArcLight UI
• Create wiki documentation about how to implement the workaround to make the form work correctly

[seanaery]

Closing this issue as it has been investigated.