Hi Paul,

Okay, so a bit off topic but this blog post shows how you can manipulate the data going into the Examine Index (bit of self plugging as I wrote it the other day) https://www.justnik.me/blog/indexing-sort-able-dates-in-umbraco-version-8

But, this should give you a base idea of manipulating the index to put friendly names into the index.

To help with this I use a function a bit like this:

private void HandleMultiNodeTreePicker(IndexingItemEventArgs e, IPublishedContent content, string propertyAlias)
{
    try
    {
        var processed = new List<object>();
        if(content.HasProperty(propertyAlias) && content.HasValue(property))
        {
            IPublishedContent treeNode;
            using(var umbracoContext = umbracoContextFactory. EnsureUmbracoContext())
            {
                foreach(var entry in e.ValueSet.Values[propertyAlias].Cast<string>())
                {
                    foreach(var udi in entry.Split(',').Select(s=>GuidUdi.Parse(s)))
                    {
                        treeNode = umbracoContext.UmbracoContext.Content.GetById(udi);
                        processed.Add(treeNode.Name);
                    }
                }
            }
            e.ValueSet.Values.Add(propertyAlias + "Cleaned", processed);
        }
    }
    catch(exception e)
    {
        //do some error logging here
    }
}

This adds a field to the index with the alias of your multi-node tree picker property and "Cleaned" appended to the end.

Then when you are searching you can do a text search against this field for your category :-)

Hope that helps

Nik

Cheers Nik! Yeah that gave me enough to put something together.

The indexer I think I'll eventually put some more work into to create a separate index, but updating the external index works for now.

Here's roughly what I came up with (was nice that I could use the strongly typed model in U8):

    public void Initialize()
    {
        if (examineManager.TryGetIndex("ExternalIndex", out IIndex externalIndex))
        {
            externalIndex.FieldDefinitionCollection.AddOrUpdate(new FieldDefinition("postDate", FieldDefinitionTypes.DateTime));

            ((BaseIndexProvider)externalIndex).TransformingIndexValues += IndexerComponent_TransformingIndexValues;
        }
    }

    private void IndexerComponent_TransformingIndexValues(object sender, IndexingItemEventArgs e)
    {
        if (int.TryParse(e.ValueSet.Id, out var nodeId))
            switch (e.ValueSet.ItemType)
            {
                case "EqtrBlogPostPage":
                    using (var umbracoContext = umbracoContextFactory.EnsureUmbracoContext())
                    {
                        var contentNode = umbracoContext.UmbracoContext.Content.GetById(nodeId);
                        if (contentNode != null)
                        {
                            var blogNode = contentNode as EqtrBlogPostPage;

                            List<string> categoryNames = new List<string>();

                            var articleDate = blogNode.PostDate;
                            e.ValueSet.Set("postDate", articleDate.Date.ToString("dd/MM/yyyy"));

                            foreach (var category in blogNode.Categories)
                            {
                                categoryNames.Add(category.Name);
                            }

                            e.ValueSet.Set("categoryNames", string.Join(",", categoryNames.ToArray()));
                        }
                    }
                    break;
            }
    }

Ahh cool, was having some range query issuses with DateTime as well - changing to ticks sorted it out.

Hey Nik,

I'm using a similar approach to this for a multi-select list of categories on a blog entry.

The issue I've run into is that if there is a category of "something" and another category of "something else", when you search for a category name of "something" via Searcher.CreateQuery, you'll get blog entries that have either of those 2 categories. Have you come across that issue and solved it?

Regards, Matt

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