Finder Frontend

Finder frontend renders search on GOV.UK.

Live examples

Site search

Site search is available from the header of every page.

Finder pages

Finder pages provide facetted searching over a collection of documents.

• gov.uk/aaib-reports
• gov.uk/cma-cases
• gov.uk/drug-safety-update
• gov.uk/drug-device-alerts
• gov.uk/government/case-studies
• gov.uk/government/groups
• gov.uk/government/people
• gov.uk/world/organisations
• gov.uk/international-development-funding
• gov.uk/maib-reports
• gov.uk/raib-reports

The advanced search finder provides facetted searching of GOV.UK taxonomy and content types:

• gov.uk/search/advanced?group=guidance_and_regulation&topic=%2Fmoney

Read more about the advanced search finder

Nomenclature

• Finder: Page containing a list of filterable documents and filters.
• Facets: Metadata associated with documents.
• Filters: Searchable/filterable metadata for example case_state={open|closed} for a CMA case.

Dependencies

• alphagov/static: provides static assets (JS/CSS) and provides the GOV.UK templates.
• alphagov/content-store: provides the content items for the finder itself -- containing the finder title, tagged organisations and related links
• alphagov/rummager: provides search results

Running the application

$ ./startup.sh

If you are using the GDS development virtual machine then the application will be available on the host at http://finder-frontend.dev.gov.uk/

Running the test suite

Before you can run the test suite you'll need the govuk-content-schemas repository locally. See lib/govuk_content_schema_examples.rb for more details.

The default rake task runs all the tests:

$ bundle exec rake

The application has jasmine tests, which can be accessed at /specs when the application is running in development mode. These are also run when rake, above, is run. To run JavaScript tests separately: bundle exec rake jasmine:test

Making a new finder

1. If required, add a schema to alphagov/rummager describing your document type -- example
2. Publish a Finder Content Item to the content store. See the doc for Finder Content Item for more info.
3. Ensure your documents are indexed in alphagov/rummager correctly.

Developing a finder locally

You can run this application with a local file so you can develop a finder without having to publish the content item to the publishing-api.

For example:

DEVELOPMENT_FINDER_JSON=features/fixtures/aaib_reports_example.json ./startup.sh --live

How to add a fixed filter

You can use gov.uk/api/search.json?filter_link= with the path of the page you looking for to migrate.

For example, you want to filter by the field link on /government/world/organisations You can access the following: https://www.gov.uk/api/search.json?filter_link=/government/world/organisations/british-antarctic-territory You will be able to see inside results the field format

You can double check the filter by performing the following search using rummager:

http://rummager.dev.gov.uk/search.json?filter_NAME=VALUE

For more information please refer to the search api documentation.

Adding a Q&A frontend to a finder

See the documentation on the Q&A frontend and how it relates to a finder.

Application structure

• No data store -- all data comes via the APIs mentioned above.
• app/models contains two kinds of object.
  1. Value objects used to wrap up responses from API calls.
  2. Facet objects which wrap up the behaviour of different types of facet -- eg radios, selects, etc.
• app/presenters contains objects which serialise the value objects to hashes for display via mustache.
• app/parsers contains objects which transform API responses into models.