[wildfly-dev] Local Search for the Admin Console

[Harald Pehl]

During the F2F meeting in Brno Heiko and I started a little experiment: Local search for the Admin Console. The idea is to have a search index in the browser's local storage which is used to enable a "search as you type" feature. 

With the introduction of RBAC, all views were annotated with resource addresses. We reuse this information to setup an index over those addresses. The description of the r-r-d operation is extracted, tokenized and stored in the index. In addition it's possible to programmatically assign keywords to selected views. Keywords are a way to boost views in the search results. We did that for prominent views like the deployment browser.   

The index is built lazily when the user enters the search for the first time. In a typical environment this takes only a few seconds. Once the index is ready, it is stored in the local storage using the language, the operation mode (standalone / domain) and the model version as key. The size of the index is about 70 KB (for domain mode).

Under the hood the index is built using [1]. As a little extra you can reach the local search using a shortcut (Cmd+. / Ctrl+.) - therefore [2] is used. 

I found some time to polish the local search and am quite happy with the result. I'd like to add this feature to WildFly 8.0.1. If you want to take a look, grab the latest snapshot from [3] and replace the default console resources under <WF_HOME>/modules/system/layers/base/org/jboss/as/console/main/. 

What do you think?

[1] https://github.com/olivernn/lunr.js
[2] https://github.com/ccampbell/mousetrap
[3] https://repository.jboss.org/nexus/service/local/artifact/maven/redirect?r=snapshots&g=org.jboss.as&a=jboss-as-console&v=2.3.0-SNAPSHOT&e=jar&c=resources

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Harald Pehl
JBoss by Red Hat
http://hpehl.info