% Using the MasterKey Widget Set to embed metasearching functionality in any web-site % Mike Taylor % 26 July 2013 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 metasearching 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: * libpz2.js -- a low-level JavaScript library for interrogating the Service Proxy and Pazpar2. It allows the HTML/JavaScript programmer to implement simple JavaScript functions to display facets, records, etc. * masterkey-ui-core -- a higher-level, complex JavaScript library that uses libpz2.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 http://mk2.indexdata.com/ * MKDru -- a toolkit for embedding MasterKey-like searching into Drupal sites. All of these approaches require programming to a greater or lesser extent. Against this backdrop, we introduced MKWS (the MasterKey Widget Set) -- 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 identifiers 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: MKWS demo client
Go ahead, try it! You don't even need a web-server. Just copy and paste this HTML into a file on your computer -- `/tmp/magic.html`, say -- and point your web-browser at it: `file:///tmp/magic.html`. 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. * `mkwsStyle.css` provides the default CSS styling Second, the `
` 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 components: a search box and a results area. But more are supported. The main `
`s are: * `mkwsSearch` -- provides the search box and button. * `mkwsResults` -- 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. * `mkwsLang` -- provides links to switch between one of several different UI languages. By default, English, Danish and German are provided. * `mkwsSwitch` -- provides links to switch between a view of the result records and of the targets that provide them. Only meaningful when `mkwsTargets` is also provided. * `mkwsTargets` -- the area where per-target information will appear when selected by the link in the `mkwsSwitch` area. Of interest mostly for fault diagnosis rather than for end-users. * `mkwsStat` --provides a status line summarising the statistics of the various targets. To see all of these working together, just put them all into the HTML `` like so:
Configuration ------------- TODO resposive resize Control over HTML and CSS ------------------------- TODO More sophisticated applications will not simply place the `
`s together, but position them carefully within an existing page framework -- such as a Drupal template, an OPAC or a SharePoint page. Breaking up mkwsResults overriding styles Popup results with jQuery UI ---------------------------- TODO Authentication and target configuration --------------------------------------- TODO Reference Guide --------------- ### Configuration object TODO ### jQuery plugin invocation TODO ### The structure of the HTML generated by the MKWS widgets TODO - - - Copyright (C) 2013 by IndexData ApS,