Low Search - Relationships, Playa

Question

I have a question about Low Search. I'd like to create a search field that searches throughout our blog.

Entries in our Blog channel, however, are like empty shells. The only field they have is a Playa field. The actual content is stored in other channels (e.g. Content-Origin channel) and pulled in with Playa.

In other words, when an editor wants to create a blog post they first add pieces of as entries in the Content-Origin channel. Then, they create a Blog entry and select all of those pieces with Playa. Our template serves up the Blog entry.

How would Low Search handle this situation? If a match is found, does Low Search serve the users the entry from Content-Origin? Or from Blog channel? Thank you!

Answer 1

Low Search will always return the entries that actually contain the content, in your case the Content-Origin channel.

The keyword-searchable index for an entry consists of its fields. A Playa field contains the ID, url_title and title of the selected entries (as designed by P&T), so in a limited way, an entry can contain some data from the related entries.

However, an entry's index never contains data from its child entries. I pondered over it once, but really, it's just a big Can o’ Worms™ you do not want to open. Keeping the index up to date if the parent or one of its children changes is a nightmare, what to do if the child entry also has a relationship field... It can get ugly quickly.

So, you'd have to make collections for your Content-Origin channels, and in the results, link back to the blog post by checking if the entry has a parent in the Blog channel.