% The MKWS manual: embedded metasearching with the MasterKey Widget Set % Mike Taylor % November 2014 Introduction ============ There are lots of practical problems in building resource discovery solutions. One of the biggest, and most ubiquitous is incorporating metasearching functionality into existing web-sites -- for example, content-management systems, library catalogues or intranets. In general, even when access to core metasearching functionality is provided by simple web-services such as [Pazpar2](http://www.indexdata.com/pazpar2), integration work is seen as a major part of most projects. Index Data provides several different toolkits for communicating with its metasearching middleware, trading off varying degrees of flexibility against convenience: * [pz2.js](http://www.indexdata.com/pazpar2/doc/ajaxdev.html) -- a low-level JavaScript library for interrogating the [Service Proxy](http://www.indexdata.com/service-proxy/) and [Pazpar2](http://www.indexdata.com/pazpar2/). It allows the HTML/JavaScript programmer to create JavaScript applications to display facets, records, etc. that are fetched from the metasearching middleware. * masterkey-ui-core -- a higher-level, complex JavaScript library that uses pz2.js to provide the pieces needed for building a full-featured JavaScript application. * MasterKey Demo UI -- an example of a searching application built on top of masterkey-ui-core. Available as a public demo at * [MKDru](http://www.indexdata.com/masterkey-drupal) -- a toolkit for embedding MasterKey-like searching into [Drupal](https://www.drupal.org/) sites. All but the last of these approaches require programming to a greater or lesser extent. Against this backdrop, we introduced [MKWS (the MasterKey Widget Set)](http://mkws.indexdata.com/) -- a set of simple, very high-level HTML+CSS+JavaScript components that can be incorporated into any web-site to provide MasterKey searching facilities. By placing `
`s with well-known MKWS classes in any HTML page, the various components of an application can be embedded: search-boxes, results areas, target information, etc. Simple example ============== The following is [a complete MKWS-based searching application](//example.indexdata.com/simple.html): MKWS demo client
Go ahead, try it! Simply put the above in a file (e.g index.html), drop it into a folder accessible with an ordinary web-server (e.g Apache) and load it in your web browser. Just like that, you have working metasearching. How the example works --------------------- If you know any HTML, the structure of the file will be familar to you: the `` element at the top level contains a `` and a ``. In addition to whatever else you might want to put on your page, you can add MKWS elements. These fall into two categories. First, the prerequisites in the HTML header, which are loaded from the tool site `mkws.indexdata.com`: * `mkws-complete.js` contains all the JavaScript needed by the widget-set, including a copy of the jQuery library. * `mkws.css` provides the default CSS styling Second, within the HTML body, `
` elements with special IDs that begin `mkws-` can be provided. These are filled in by the MKWS code, and provide the components of the searching UI. The very simple application above has only two such widgets: a search box and a results area. But more are supported. Defining widget elements ======================== Widget type ----------- An HTML element is made an MKWS widget by including an MKWS class-name. These names begin `mkws-`: what follows that prefix specifies the type of the widget. The type can be any sequence of alphanumeric characters and hyphens _except_ something beginning `team` -- see below. The main widgets are: * `mkws-search` -- provides the search box and button. * `mkws-results` -- provides the results area, including a list of brief records (which open out into full versions when clicked), paging for large results sets, facets for refining a search, sorting facilities, etc. * `mkws-progress` -- shows a progress bar indicating how many of the targets have responded to the search request. * `mkws-stat` -- provides a status line summarising the statistics of the various targets. * `mkws-switch` -- provides links to switch between a view of the result records and of the targets that provide them. Only meaningful when `mkws-targets` is also provided. * `mkws-targets` -- the area where per-target information will appear when selected by the link in the `mkws-switch` area. Of interest mostly for fault diagnosis rather than for end-users. * `mkws-lang` -- provides links to switch between one of several different UI languages. By default, English, Danish and German are provided. To see all of these working together, just put them all into the HTML `` like so:
The full set of supported widgets is described in the reference guide [below](#widgets). Widget team ----------- In general a set of widgets work together in a team: in the example above, the search-term that the user enters in the `mkws-search` widget is used to generate the set of records that are displayed in the `mkws-results` widget. Sometimes, it's desirable to have multiple teams in a single page. A widget can be placed in a named team by giving it (in addition to its main class) a class that begins with `mkws-team-`: what follows that prefix specifies the team that the widget is part of. For example, `