Query for etherpadlite to support global search

[Lina-LI-Na]

Hi Timo. Many thanks for providing this plugin to the community; its functionality is really appreciated by our staff and students, and we’re really grateful to you for your efforts to maintain and update it.

On that note, please could I quickly query whether you have any plans to update the plugin to be fully compatible with Moodle v3.1, and its new Global Search feature in particular? To clarify: while we’ve tested the Etherpad Lite plugin under v3.1 and all of the core functionality seems to work fine, we’ve found that instances of the activity are not searchable via v3.1’s Global Search feature. Please see the following screenshot for details, which lists all of the available areas that can searched under v3.1 (note that these settings are available via: Site Administration -> Plugins -> Search -> Manage Global Search):

http://imgur.com/lWWQByE

Note also that the above screenshot was taken on a v3.1 system where the Etherpad Lite plugin is installed and available. However, as you can see, the Etherpad Lite activity is not listed as being available to be searched. Obviously, this is likely to be a significant problem/cause of confusion for users who might want to search for specific instances of the Etherpad Lite activity across Moodle.

I’m not a developer, but my understanding is that mod plugins can be made searchable relatively easily via the addition of a new search class within the plugin’s codebase (located at ../classes/search/activity.php). Please see the following for further details:

https://moodle.org/mod/forum/discuss.php?d=334938
https://docs.moodle.org/31/en/Global_search
https://docs.moodle.org/dev/Search_API

We really hope this search capability can be added to Etherpad Lite as I’m sure it would be a huge benefit to our users (as well as those of other v3.1 systems) and, again, many thanks for all your efforts to develop this plugin and share it with the community.

Best wishes,
Lina

[tjwelde]

Hi Lina,
thank you for your request.

I am currently working in another project and don't have much time, but would love to merge some pull requests, if someone could provide one. Do you have any resources available to add this feature?

Regarding your specific issue:
Yes, it would be possible to activate Global Search for this module, but keep in mind, that the contents of the pads can change quite a lot, so the index may not be very recent from time to time.

Best regards
Timo

[Lina-LI-Na]

Hi Timo,
Thanks for your reply. I think to make the title and description searchable is helpful enough.
According to my test, to support the global search function, I did the following steps, for your reference:
1. create a classes folder in the etherpadlite folder. create a search folder in the classes folder.
2. Then in this directory : /var/www/html/moodle31/mod/etherpadlite/classes/search
add a file named "activity.php" with the following content: