Convio Search API?

Matthew Andrade

This is what I was hoping to do and would like to know if API's are even an option to preform this.

I would like to be able to create a search form that would search our complete list of storybuilder stories and display them. For example, if someone types in George Bush I was hoping to get every story that we have with that name in it as a title and or within the story. Now the Search component that comes with Convio uses the google search application. I was giving some instruction to add a parameter to my form syntax and it's just not helping and or working.

Here is the syntax:

<form method="GET" action="Search" name="NewsSearch">

<FIELDSET>

<span class="search-title"><strong>Search the news section:</strong>

<INPUT id=query title="Search Term" onfocus="this.value='';" name=query />

<INPUT id=query type=hidden value=" site:www.ifcj.org/site/News2" name=query />

<INPUT type=submit name=submit class="Button" value=Search />

</FIELDSET>

</form>

What we have is a main search form on our site that works just fine searching the entire site but like I had explained we would like to search just the storybuilder stories. Now if your an admin and go to the storybuilder section of the admin side you get a form that you can fill and then filter to find a story that you need to find using keywords and or published dates etc...

Now this is where the API question comes in. Is there anything that we can do API wise to give the visitor the ability to search our system for stories is the same manner as the form on the admin side.

I was told that there is a feature request for the ability to do a sub search within the same site. But we both know that we aren't going to see that for some time. I am very interested in getting to use the API's and I thought what a perfect opportunity.

Any info would help.

Thanks!

Jeff Mills

An official and documented API hasn't been built for this purpose. However, I found a Convio-specific template tag that you can put into a PageBuilder page to search stories. In any PB page, include "]" and it will expand to a simple search form that has one input field and a submit button. It searches the keywords. If you don't like how it looks, you should be able to copy the form HTML and change its appearance while submitting the same form action and parameters.

Michael

JeffMills :

An official and documented API hasn't been built for this purpose. However, I found a Convio-specific template tag that you can put into a PageBuilder page to search stories. In any PB page, include "]" and it will expand to a simple search form that has one input field and a submit button. It searches the keywords. If you don't like how it looks, you should be able to copy the form HTML and change its appearance while submitting the same form action and parameters.

And if you know how to parse AJAX responseText objects, and provided Convio's page returns well-formed HTML, you can create a search tool on your own site that uses the returned HTML page from Convio. It would be a bit heavy handed, but if you don't want to jump to a Convio page for the search, this is an option. The same can be done with server-side code too, but with libraries like JQuery/Prototype/mootools/etc. (all of which, by the way, are basically the same I've found. I favor Prototype personally...), JavaScript coding is VERY cross-browser compatible nowadays and not very hard either. Doing it via client-side is also much more portable, so you can quickly add it like a widget anywhere. Anyway, just an idea