For developers: Search with accented characters

Sitefinity CMS uses the Lucene search provider by default. Lucene uses the so-called analyzer classes to examine indexed terms from text and generate a token stream. To implement an accent-insensitive search in Sitefinity CMS, you replace the default analyzer used by Lucene with one that replaces accented characters with the corresponding unaccented ones.

Lucene provides several filter classes, for example, the ASCIIFoldingFilter class, which you can use to customize the search functionality and convert special characters.

For more information, see:

• Lucene analyzers
• ASCIIFoldingFilter class

The following example demonstrates how to implement a custom analyzer class:

In the code above, you use the ASCIIFoldingFilter class to filter the result in the token stream of the custom analyzer.

To enable Lucene to use your custom analyzer in Sitefinity CMS, you need to register the custom analyzer in Sitefinity CMS using the ObjectFactory class. You do this in the Application_Start method of your Global.asax class:

As a result, your new analyzer class is used both during indexing and during search. This means that the search index stores all characters as characters without accents and that during the search operation all character accents are removed as well.