How to Enhance your Laserfiche WebLink Portal with Search URLs
Laserfiche WebLink is a powerful, user-friendly public web portal that enables organizations to share read-only versions of specific documents with the public online. While it is very easy to customize the WebLink interface with the built-in designer, here is how you can go even further by taking advantage of search URLs.
Example
We recently wrote about how to create a custom WebLink portal to display an archived collection of nature articles. Here is how we added another page to this portal with a collection of clickable images. Each image, when clicked, opens up related articles within WebLink.
For example, clicking on “Crabbing” runs a search in WebLink for all articles containing the word “crabbing” and displays the documents along with the specific pages where the search term appears.
In order to accomplish this, we’ve taken advantage of search URLs.
What is a Search URL?
In Laserfiche WebLink, you can embed appropriate search terms in a URL. Opening such a URL in your Web browser will automatically run the specified search within WebLink and display the related content.
In order to create a search URL, simply use the following syntax:
http://hostname/WebLink/Search.aspx?dbid=x&searchcommand=searchquery
- “hostname” represents the Web server where WebLink is installed.
- “x” represents the dbid value of the WebLink repository configuration you want to use (this is only pertinent if you have multiple repositories configured).
- “searchquery” represents the advanced search syntax you want to use.
For the above example, we created the following search URL:
http://focusonnature.laserfiche.com/WebLink/Search.aspx?searchcommand=crabbing
- “focusonnature” is the name of the Web server.
- “crabbing” is the search query.
- Since we only have one repository configured, we omitted the dbid value.
This URL is then linked to the image of the crab using HTML.
When someone clicks on the image of the crab, Laserfiche WebLink runs a full-text search for the word “crabbing” within the Laserfiche repository and pulls up all the articles that contain that word. Under each document link, the pages where the word appears are highlighted:
We’ve followed this process for numerous other keywords. Every picture on this Webpage has a link to a different WebLink search URL .
Note: Make sure to encode the search URLs properly when typing them in.
