Instant search

[maxiloc]

Until recently 😄 typeahead was out default autocompletion implementation for us. I think now that we have this repo, it could be very cool that it could be our instant search default implementation. I think this is THE the place where we could unify all our integration instant implementation.

I have several points where I am not sure how we can implement that in a generic customizable way. But I sure we will manage.

I am thinking of an instant implementation that will look like this :

$("#instant_search_input").instant({
  "container": "#instant_search_container",
  "content_template": "#instant_search_content",
  [...]
});

Obviously there is a lot to discuss

Do you think this could make sense ?

[redox]

I'm convinced we need more libraries to tackle the search UI problem (and we've already started to investigate what we can do with ui-kit) but we probably need another repository for that. This auto-completion library will be a dependency of it as well as an URL manager, a Slider widget, some conjunctive/disjunctive/hierarchical facet widgets, etc...

[maxiloc]

Ok that make sense.

[redox]

Let's close it for now then.

[pixelastic]

Sorry I didn't really get it.

Are you saying that this autocomplete.js is part of a larger family of instant-search.js, slider.js and url-manager.js libraries we'll build ? Each one handling one UI use-case ?

[redox]

Yes, something like that. What do you think? (it will not be slider.js but rather facet.slider.js -> all those components will be very Algolia centric).

[pixelastic]

Hmm yes, that could work I guess. Each of this library having a clear UI role.

This still make me wonder:

• What about the ui-kit ? Will we split it in several libraries ?
• What about logic code (like hierarchical category facetting) ? Should it be handled by the helper or the facet.hierarchical.js new library ?

I don't have a clear answer to that, just throwing it here. I think I'd rather have the helper with all the logic but no UI, and then several libraries only handling the UI.

[redox]

What about the ui-kit ? Will we split it in several libraries ?

Yeah, we still need to discuss about it with @bobylito; here the goal would be to create reusable UI components for developers. The ui-kit is more about creating a search UI without code.

I don't have a clear answer to that, just throwing it here. I think I'd rather have the helper with all the logic but no UI, and then several libraries only handling the UI.

Yes 👍

[vvo]

We need the ui kit features exposed as a programmatic API, so first we should describe and iterate on the API we want to provide

[vvo]

The ultimate goal wpild be to be able to use this programmatic API without having to embed and configure both the client and helper, this should all be handled by the ui.js