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For developers: Index external content

Sitefinity CMS can index data items that are managed on external systems. 
For example, if you have blog posts, which are managed on an external system, by retrieving values of the posts' data fields, adding them to a search document, and updating Sitefinty's index, the blog posts are indexed in Sitefinity.

The data content that you want to index must be compatible with Sitefinity CMS Search. This means that the fields that you want to participate in the index must be of type string, int, or DateTime.

To index external content in Sitefinity's indexes, you must create a search document for each indexed item and push it into the current Search Service implementation. When search documents are indexed, they are displayed in search results and search suggestions in Sitefinity.

The following code demonstrates a creation of a search document, populated with a number fields, which is pushed into Sitefinity CMS index:

/// <summary>
/// Creates a new document and adds it to the search index.
/// </summary>
public void AddSearchDocument()
{
  var fields = new List<IField>();
  
  // The identity field
  var identityFld = new Field();
  identityFld.Name = "IdentityField";
  identityFld.Value = "some unique identifier"; // Use lowercase only
  fields.Add(identityFld);
  
  var myTitleField = new Field();
  myTitleField.Name = "Title";
  myTitleField.Value = "Here goes the title";
  fields.Add(myTitleField);
  
  var lastModifiedField = new Field();
  lastModifiedField.Name = "LastModified";
  lastModifiedField.Value = DateTime.UtcNow;
  fields.Add(lastModifiedField);
  
  // Create the document, containing the fields that we constructed
  var doc = new Document(fields, "IdentityField");
  
  // index the created document
  ServiceBus.ResolveService<ISearchService>().UpdateIndex("index", new List<IDocument>() { doc });
}

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