Using the OSF SearchAPI Module

Introduction
The Drupal SearchAPI is a module that is used to create a search engine for a Drupal website. OSF for Drupal does re-implement the general SearchAPI to be able to communicate with the Search web service endpoint.

It is also possible to use the search server to index the local content into an OSF instance. However, since this is not the preferred way to save local Drupal content type entities into OSF, we are not discussing any of these features in this manual page. All the local content data should be saved into the CCR using the OSF FieldStorage.

Using the Search Engine
Once everything is properly configured, you can good to you lookup page to start searching for content that comes from your OSF instance. There are three major areas in a search page: If you enter a search keyword in the search box, then all the results will appear below that search box and the facets blocks will appears where they got positioned. Each of the facets that have been exposed will be populated with a series of values that could be used to filter the content of the search resultset. The number of records in each facet is displayed in parenthesis.

It is also possible to theme the results that are returned. Check the Theming OSF SearchAPI results section for more information. If you click on one of the facet, you will be redirected to a new search page where the facet as been applied. The number of results should go down after the facet is applied to the search query. More than one facet can be applied to a single search query. Search facets can be removed by clicking the  link.