Search driven application development on SharePoint 2010
Last week I wrote a high level overview on The Search Developer Story in SharePoint 2010 over at the Enterprise Search Blog. Next, I'll provide a more detailed look at the different integration points in a series of blog posts. It will be aimed mainly at developers and architects wanting a better understanding of the technical architecture on the search side, and how to leverage the SharePoint platform for developing search driven applications.
Before diving into the details, let me provide a summary of the query side integration options. The diagram below shows the main query side integration points, applicable for both SharePoint Search and FAST Search for SharePoint, which now share a common platform and interfaces.
As shown in the figure, applications based on the SharePoint 2010 platform can leverage different query components (all available on the web front end in a SharePoint deployment). You can read more about the details of each integration point here, including benefits and some advanced features available with FAST Search only. For your convenience, here's a quick recap:
Search Web Parts
- Shared for SharePoint Search and FAST Search, providing a unified user experience
- Based on the Federation OM
The main SharePoint object models on the query side are the Federation OM and the Query OM.
The Federation Object Model (OM)
- A new object model in SharePoint 2010
- Provides a unified interface to search against different locations/engines
- Allows for combining and merging of results
- Supports 3 locations out-of-box in SharePoint 2010
- SharePoint Search
- FAST Search
- OpenSearch
The Query Object Model (OM)
- The lower level, typed object model
- The object model that other services and object models are based on
- Communicates with the Search Service Application (SSA) for getting search results
Integration points that also are available for applications outside SharePoint farm, e.g. standalone non-web based applications and Silverlight applications;
The Query Web Service
- SOAP based ASMX service
- Uses same schema for FAST Search and SharePoint Search
- Provides search results, query suggestions, meta data and more
The Query RSS
- Lightweight integration point
Coming up, more details on the Search Service Application, the object models, the web service and more. Stay tuned!
Comments
- Anonymous
June 27, 2012
Nice Article !!!