News from Jan 19, 2008

Been a grim day so decided to write a search plugin for my browser...

Wading through accounts all day has been tedious and to top it off, some mods to our latest beta of Bubbles corrupted data on a development server and when I tried restoring a backup it died horribly but I don't have enough access to the server to go in and fix it. Rargh!

So, I'd been discussing the idea of search plugins with Dan earlier in the day (anything to try and keep accounts work interesting) and one thing I wanted to try was adding a search plugin to the browser.

Luckily, it just so happens that Firefox supports open search. There's even a handy tutorial on the FF dev site

The only problem is - their docs are wrong. And to make matters worse, Firefox gives utterly useless error messages when your XML is wrong, or indeed anything else - it's like they just trap for any exception and spit the exact same error message out regardless of exception.

So, to save anyone else trying to make an open search plugin that works in Firefox 2 or above and Internet Explorer 7 or above, here's the XML I used:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<OpenSearchDescription xmlns="http://a9.com/-/spec/opensearch/1.1/">
  <ShortName>Adaptavist</ShortName>
  <Description>Search Adaptavist Website</Description>
  <Tags>adaptavist wiki</Tags>
  <Contact>help@adaptavist.com</Contact>
  <Url type="text/html" 
       template="https://www.adaptavist.com/dosearchsite.action?searchQuery.spaceKey=conf_global&amp;searchQuery.queryString={searchTerms}"/>
  <LongName>Adaptavist Website</LongName>
  <Image height="16" width="16" type="image/png">https://www.adaptavist.com/download/attachments/918/icon16.png</Image>
  <Query role="example" searchTerms="builder" />
  <OutputEncoding>UTF-8</OutputEncoding>
  <InputEncoding>UTF-8</InputEncoding>
</OpenSearchDescription>

I attached the XML file to our home page as a file attachment so it's publicly available.

I then added an auto-discovery link to the <head> section using Confluence's Custom HTML feature:

<link rel="search" type="application/opensearchdescription+xml" title="Adaptavist" href="https://www.adaptavist.com/download/attachments/918/adaptavist.xml">

And viola! If you are using a modern browser, check the little arrow in (or next to) it's search box for a list of search engines...

Internet Exploder

Firefox

Now you can quickly search our user guides, forums, communities, tutorials and everything else you have access to on our site from the comfort of your own browser search box (obviously you need to select Adaptavist as the search engine before doing the search)