Tridion TBB, fetch information of external source

Question

I am going to build a search page with a text box and some refiners on the left side. I am using GSA (Google Search Appliance) for search functionality. The steps are:

• User enters search criteria and press search button
• I pass that query to GSA and get result in xml format

How can I display result on my search page?

Each search result item contains a TCM ID and I am using a fixed template for all search results.

Do I need to build a TBB that fetches the result from GSA and then renders with a template? If yes, then how can I pass search query to TBB when user presses the search button?

I have built many other TBBs, but all fetches information of current page, search page has to fetch information from an external source.

Help or guidance appreciated.

Answer 1

From what I know about the GSA, it is a crawl-based search, i.e. you point it to your website, it crawls it and gives you search results based on what it crawled. So having it return a list of TCM IDs seems odd.

Now, TBBs actually are part of Content Management extension points, whereas what you seem to be trying to do is Content Delivery/Presentation-side searching. What I suggest is to take a look at how data flows through Tridion and how its extension points fit together to gain a better understanding. Here is a link to the diagram explaining the flow (login required): http://sdllivecontent.sdl.com/LiveContent/content/en-US/SDL_Tridion_2011_SPONE/concept_84B7B302FD5F410A8D01EFF30919A3C6

Based on the above , mainly the fact that you're using GSA, this isn't really a Tridion question, rather a GSA specific question. Consult the GSA documentation on how to customise your search page to submit your search params. One thing you can do in Tridion to get more relevant results from the GSA is make sure your content editors make their content SEO friendly, and that your templates render the html metadata tags/keywords and fall inline with SEO best practices.