Using Azure Search to index and search an Orchard CMS site

Question

I am working on an Orchard CMS system that is hosted in Azure. However, using the inbuilt Lucene search it has proved difficult to implement a search algorithm that filters out documents that are links to files (e.g. PDF/Images) and filtering out documents that do not belong to certain taxonomies have are associated in a certain lat/long square, date/time of occurrence. To get an idea of the data that I am dealing with, the website is https://ahdb.org.uk/. Consequently, I am looking into implementing Azure Search to index and provide the search functionality for the site. Just so that you know the version of Orchard that is installed is 1.10.1.0.

I have searched the web to the best of my ability and there seems to be nothing out there.

Graham Harris

Answer 1

While there's no direct integration of Orchard with Azure Cognitive Search, it should still be possible with a little work. It looks like you have custom rules about what you need to index. You might need to create a custom database view that normalizes the data and is specific about your use case, and then feed that into the Azure Search pipeline. The Orchard 1.x schema is very relational, and will require some understanding of how parts and content items are related, as well as how versioning is implemented. A good way to do that is to install the miniprofiler module and look at some of the queries being generated by Orchard itself as it's doing similar tasks (such as a projection of data that looks like what you want to feed into search).