Implementing Sites 9.6 Content Delivery search with DXA

Question

Tridion Sites 9.6 introduces an out-of-the-box (OOTB) Content Delivery search.

What would be needed to add the OOTB CD search functionality to a DXA 2.2 implementation?

For comparison, the (I believe SI4T-based) DXA search module has the following steps per the documentation.

1. Configure search provider
2. Install search module on the Content Manager
3. Install search module on the .NET or Java application
4. Configure search in the Content Manager (set index URLs for Staging and Live)
5. Configure Search Query URL in Topology Manager

For OOTB CD search, I think DXA would need:

1. Installation and configuration for the search "engine" (Elastic)
2. Tridion Sites-specific configuration updates as part of the upgrade or install (deployer?)
3. Application code to handle the search requests and desired behavior (what results to show, how many to return, type-ahead, highlighting, edge cases, etc.).

I understand that for OOTB CD search the application should use the GraphQL-based Content Delivery API, right?

Anything else?

Answer 1

Indeed, the DXA Search Module is based on SI4T, which stems from the days that there was no built-in site search functionality in Tridion Sites.

SI4T is a combination of CM TBBs, Deployer extension and (example) Query APIs (an abstraction around the Search Engine's APIs).

DXA Search Module provides an MVC abstraction on top of the SI4T abstraction, which also supports non-SI4T based implementations (Search Providers).

With the built-in Search functionality in Tridion Sites 9.5, you no longer need SI4T. Instead, you need a DXA Search Provider which interfaces with the new CD Search API (which is indeed GraphQL-based).