Making AjaxSearch Work with Easy2Gallery Data

AjaxSearch is often treated as a document-only search layer, but older projects also needed it to search structured addon data such as Easy2Gallery records. The original solution here was to define a custom data source for the gallery table.

Example Structure

[!AjaxSearch? &whereSearch=`easy2`!]

function easy2(&$main, &$joined) {
    $main = array(
        'tb_name' => 'digimonworld_easy2_files',
        'tb_alias' => 'e2g',
        'id' => 'id',
        'searchable' => array('alias','summary','tag','description'),
        'displayed' => array('alias','summary','tag','description')
    );
    $main['filters'][] = array(
        'field' => 'status',
        'oper' => '=',
        'value' => '1'
    );
    $joined = NULL;
}

Main Takeaway

Search becomes much more useful once addon data is treated as first-class content. The key is to describe the searchable table clearly instead of trying to force everything through the default document model.