AEM 6.X - Predictive Search and Spell check

Search is a very important feature when it comes to any CMS solution. AEM offers a lot of cool search features that you can use. I will briefly touch base on the following two search features that i am working off late.

• Predictive Search
• Spell Check

Predictive Search

Prerequisites:

You need to have atleast OAK 1.1.6 to enable predictive search in AEM.

AEM 6.1 ships with a higher OAK version, so in a way, this feature is available in OOTB installation.However, if your application runs on AEM 6.0, you might want to check the OAK version and bring it up to atleast 1.1.6

Configuration :

Predictive search can be configured in AEM 6.x using the following simple steps:

• Configure a lucene index for word suggestions

If you are using lucene, then following index configuration is applicable 

/oak:index/lucene-suggest
  - jcr:primaryType = "oak:QueryIndexDefinition"
  - compatVersion = 2
  - type = "lucene"
  - async = "async"
  - suggestUpdateFrequencyMinutes = 60
  + indexRules
    - jcr:primaryType = "nt:unstructured"
    + nt:base
      + properties
        - jcr:primaryType = "nt:unstructured"
        + jcr:description
          - propertyIndex = true
          - analyzed = true
          - useInSuggest = true

you can add other properties like jcr:title depending upon the requirement.  

• Using property rep:suggest() to retrieve word suggestions.

OAK 1.1.6 introduces support for rep:suggest() property to enable word suggestionsThe following query can be used:

SELECT [rep:suggest()] FROM nt:base WHERE [jcr:path] = '/' AND SUGGEST('keyword')

Spell Check Support

Enabling spell check requires the same steps as that of predictive search. You need OAK 1.1.6 to get this working.

Configuration :

The following lucene index needs to be created first

/oak:index/lucene-spellcheck
  - jcr:primaryType = "oak:QueryIndexDefinition"
  - compatVersion = 2
  - type = "lucene"
  - async = "async"
  + indexRules
    - jcr:primaryType = "nt:unstructured"
    + nt:base
      + properties
        - jcr:primaryType = "nt:unstructured"
        + jcr:title
          - propertyIndex = true
          - analyzed = true
          - useInSpellcheck = true

rep:spellcheck() can be used for getting spell suggestions as used in the following query:

SELECT [rep:spellcheck()] FROM nt:base WHERE [jcr:path] = '/' AND SPELLCHECK('keyword')