ATG Search: A few key things to note

While answering the question, what is a commerce search?? the key concepts one must explain is the difference of a normal keyword search and a commerce search.ATG Search will help you in setting up a commerce search in your website. Implementing a Commerce Search on your site involves the following steps:

1. Specify repository items and attributes to index through an XML file.
2. Based on the information in the XML file, the repository items are transformed into XHTML documents.
3. These XHTML documents are indexed by ATG Search.
4. Using search forms in your website(form handlers that communicate with ATG Search), visitors can search through these indexed documents.

There are a couple of formhandlers which are out of the box components and are used to build forms for issuing queries to the ATG Search.These formhandlers are provided inside the package “atg.search.query.formhandlers“.

1. QueryFormHandler
2. StructuredQueryFormHandler
3. BrowseFormHandler
4. ViewInContextFormHandler
5. SimilarDocsFormHandler
6. CategorizeFormHandler

All the above form handlers extends from an abstract class “BaseSearchFormHandler“.Another important class is a “SearchContext” class which is a session scoped component for maintaining state information between requests.