New opentaps keyword search feature

And now for something I’m especially proud of.

We’ve just finished putting together the new keyword search feature for opentaps. Now if you go to opentaps CRM, you’ll see a new keyword search box on the right:

Type in a keyword, click on search, and opentaps will return results from different sections of the CRM application, including accounts, leads, contacts, cases, orders:

And here’s an example of searching for an order by its ID:

The results are returned in a floating panel which shows up on top whatever screen you’re on.  You can click on a result to take you to it, or just close the floating panel to stay in the page you’re already in.

Now Here’s the Best Part

This new keyword search feature is implemented with Apache lucene and hibernate search. What we’ve done is create a separate and modular component in opentaps and loaded  with the Spring framework as a domain under our domain driven architecture:

Each opentaps application then uses the underlying search component to put together its own search services and user interface. For example, opentaps CRM uses the accounts, lead, contact, cases, opportunities, and orders search services from the search domain.

What this also means is that if you want to use a different indexing and search engine, all you have to do is implement the search domain and then plug it into opentaps using this our domain driven architecture.

Anybody out there interested in working with the Google Search Appliance?