I think there’s a need for reconfigurable spatial search components that streamline the creation of spatial portals. These components need to be created on a flexible framework supporting “reconfigurableness”. Jonathan Gale introduced me to Banana. It integrates with Solr and is a port of Kibana (which works with Elastic Search). The user builds their UI in the browser by instantiating and configuring individual components. Need table of search results? Just drop it in and select which Solf fields you want displayed. Need a text input box for search terms? Drag and drop it where you want it. Once the UI is complete, it can be saved, frozen and deployed.
Here’s the current results of my crude explorations:
The map uses Leaflet. Search results are from an OGP Solr schema populated with data from a web crawl . As with OGP, the search results update as the map changes. As with OGP, as you mouse over the search results the layer’s location is indicated on the map (notice the small blue circle near the center of the map). There’s no preview or download.
If you have other suggestions for reconfigurable UI frameworks, please let me know. I’d be happy to consider other options. But, I do think a framework approach significant advantages. First, I don’t have to invent and code configuration. Instead, it is provided by the framework. For example, here’s a config tab for the table that displays the table of search results:
As configured, just two of the Solr fields (LayerDisplayName and Institution) are displayed (in 9 point font) in the search results. Adding another field just requires a couple mouse clicks or editing the right config file. If you don’t want a header, just click the check box to turn it off. If you don’t know what the “Trim Factor” option is, just mouse over the question mark icon. Creating a search application that is independent of the Solr schema can be a challenge. By using a framework like Banana the schema details are a configuration issue. Any schema can be accommodated via these configuration tabs on the reusable components. Maybe you would like to swap the map and the search results so the map on the left side and the search results on the right? In Banana, that reconfiguration takes exactly three mouse clicks.
Banana is based on Angular 1.2. Angular 2, now in beta, is incredibly different from Angular 1.2. If it is successful, we’ll end up with a reconfigurable Solr framework that is very different from the existing Banana. Also, Banana faces some competition from Lucid’s non-open source components in SILK. Still, I think Banana is a reasonable choice for creating reconfigurable spatial search components. I’m very interested your thoughts at SpacemanSteve@gmail.com.