NAVbar search providers
NAV’s search bar (the one seen at the top of every NAV web page) provides a
pluggable architecture for search implementations. Any class that implements
the interface of nav.web.info.searchproviders.SearchProvider can
be used as a provider of search results for the NAVbar.
The list of SearchProvider implementations that are used to respond to
NAVbar search is configured in NAV’s Django settings. The default list, as of
NAV 4.8, looks like this:
# Classes that implement a search engine for the web navbar
SEARCHPROVIDERS = [
'nav.web.info.searchproviders.RoomSearchProvider',
'nav.web.info.searchproviders.LocationSearchProvider',
'nav.web.info.searchproviders.NetboxSearchProvider',
'nav.web.info.searchproviders.InterfaceSearchProvider',
'nav.web.info.searchproviders.VlanSearchProvider',
'nav.web.info.searchproviders.PrefixSearchProvider',
'nav.web.info.searchproviders.DevicegroupSearchProvider',
'nav.web.info.searchproviders.UnrecognizedNeighborSearchProvider',
]
If you want to hook in your own SearchProvider, local to your installation,
you can do this by manipulating this list in your local_settings.py
file.
A simple implementation example
This is the current implementation of the Room search provider; it will do a substring search among room IDs, and then return search results which link back to each matched room’s details page.
class RoomSearchProvider(SearchProvider):
"""Searchprovider for rooms"""
name = "Rooms"
headers = [
('Roomid', 'id'),
('Description', 'description')
]
link = 'Roomid'
def fetch_results(self):
results = Room.objects.filter(id__icontains=self.query).order_by("id")
for result in results:
self.results.append(SearchResult(
reverse('room-info', kwargs={'roomid': result.id}),
result)
)
The actual work of the implementation is accomplished within the
fetch_results() method, which must return a list of
nav.web.info.searchproviders.SearchResult namedtuples.
The headers class attribute defines how to extract columnar information
from the returned SearchResult’s instance objects. In this case, the search
result tab for Rooms will contain two columns: One captioned Roomid, where
the cell values come from the Room objects’ id attribute, and one
captioned Description, where the cell values come from the Room objects’
description attributes.
The SearchProvider base class
- class nav.web.info.searchproviders.SearchProvider(query='')
Search provider interface.
To implement this interface, all that is needed is to inherit from this class, set some class attributes and override the fetch_results() method. The query, as entered by the end-user will be available in the
self.queryvariable.- __init__(query='')
- Parameters:
query – The search query string, as entered by the user.
- fetch_results()
Fetches and returns results based on
self.query.- Returns:
A list of
nav.web.info.searchproviders.SearchResultinstances.
- headers = (('Column title', 'result instance attribute name'),)
Defines the result table columns; what the column titles should be, and which attribute from the SearchResult.inst object to extract the values for this column from.
- link = 'id'
The title of the result column to put hyperlinks in
- name = 'SearchProvider'
Used as the caption of results from this provider
The SearchResult namedtuple
A SearchResult namedtuple consist of the href and inst attributes.
href is a URL used as a hyperlink on the search result line. inst is
normally some kind of instance object, typically a Django model, which
represent the search result itself.