How to search for external MySQL data extracts from Joomla 3.2

Question

I have an internal company project that is using Joomla 3.2/K2. We are pulling in external data via the Custom HTML module and including PHP code that extracts data from a MySQL database. The issue is that the search functionality of Joomla does not capture the data that is being extracted.

Is there a way to include external data in a Joomla search?

Answer 1

The easiest way would be to write a plugin, the details are on Joomla Doc's in the Developer Portal. There's even a Plugin Portal with all relevant articles listed.

Joomla has two types of search plugin, the older standard /plugins/search/ and the relatively (since 2.5) Smart Search, which has it's plugins in /plugins/finder.

Standard search plugins are relatively easy to write and are described in the Creating a Search Plug (note this is a landing page from which you select the version of Joomla you're writing for).

Smart Search was introduced with the 2.5 line and the Creating a Smart Search plug-in article covers them..

Answer 2

Inside admin you can edit the con.xml line 133; searchExternal = Yes | True will pipe responses through the integrated reg expression conduit. At that point your session will include all the params +3 which provide artifact binding. Bind to standard out, this will add the additional mysql cursor results into your answer set for presentation.