Creating a generic Search API

Project information

Project page on drupal.org: Search API
Student: Thomas Seidl (drunken monkey on d.o)
Mentor: Robert Douglass (robertDouglass)

Current status: (official) project finished
For further development see the discussion and the issue queue.

References

• Original discussion proposing this project
• Further discussion on goals and details of this project
• Related discussion about the future of core search
• Related module accomplishing something similar
• Issue Queue

Goal and Deliverables

The goal of this project is to build a generic Search API that will on the one hand abstract from the data source (using the entity_metadata module) — thus allowing all kinds of entities to be as easily indexed and searched as nodes —, and from the indexer / search engine on the other hand, making concrete implementations like Solr, Lucene, Xapian, … implement only the specific details and thereby eliminating unnecessary code duplication.
Also the gathered metadata and the search engine interface could be used to create a generic Views integration for all searches, thus letting all supported searches display their results as a configurable view.
The planned overall design is sketched in this diagram.

Project schedule

Since my semester doesn't end until the beginning of July, most of the actual coding for my project will have to be done in the last one and a half months. The first month will mostly be dedicated to planning, research and a maybe bit of prototyping.
(View all my GSoC 2010 task issues)

• May 24

  • Fax my Student Foreign Certification and Proof of Enrollment to Google
  • Create d.o project
  • Check out some related search modules (esp. searchlight)

• May 31

  • Create a discussion on project details
  • Check out some related search modules (esp. searchlight)

• June 7

  • Check out some related search modules (esp. searchlight)
  • Read up on D6->D7 changes

• June 14

  • Commit module skeleton
  • Begin creating rough module outline

• June 21

  • Complete rough outline
  • Refine future tasks

• June 28

  • Begin implementing an admin UI

• July 5

  • Implement an admin UI

• July 12

  • Finish implementing an admin UI

• July 19

  • Refinement of the core API / framework functionality

• August 2

  • Implement a specific backend

• August 9:

  • Implement a specific backend

• August 16:

  • Write tests
  • Code scrubbing, providing/improving documentation, etc.