Expose your Search API results with your RESTful API.

Building a search engine integration with faceted search in Drupal is really easy with Search API and all the helper modules around it. With this module you can expose your search to your decoupled consumer.

This falls in line with the philosophy of the RESTful module, where you get the exact output that you need. To do so you need to be declarative about it by implementing publicFieldsInfo.

First of all configure your search index in Drupal using Search API to index the fields that you want to make searchable and you want to output. Once you have Search API configured, implement publicFieldsInfo to control how you expose each field that you need to expose with your HTTP API.

You will notice in the examples that you have to indicate the name of the property. Some times it is complicated to know what properties you have available in the search results that Search API returns, to be mapped by RESTful. In those situations it is helpful to use the pass_through option in your resource definition. That will output every available property regardless of the mappings that you have done in publicFieldsInfo.

You just need to provide the sort query string to sort your results:

curl https://www.example.org/api/search/lorem?sort=-created,id

Prepend a - in front of the sort key to sort in descending order.

You can use any property that supports sorting in your search index, that will be passed to Search API.

Additionally you can use any public property in your final output to sort the results. If the selected property does not support sorting in Search API the sorting will be applied to the output generated after making the query to Search API without sorting. Use this type of sorting only if you really need to, the preferred method is to use the supported sort properties in Search API.

Add some facets to the Search API configuration and use them in your search queries. To do so use the same format used in RESTful.

If a search has relevant facet information attached, those will be sent along with the search results.

// https://www.example.org/api/basic_search/elit?filter[comment_count][value]=2&filter[comment_count][operator]=">="
{
    "count": 23,
    "facets": {
        "author": [
            { "filter": "\"0\"", "count": 12 },
            { "filter": "\"1\"", "count": 11 }
        ],
        "comment_count": [
            { "filter": "\"2\"", "count": 13 },
            { "filter": "\"3\"", "count": 10 }
        ]
    },
    "hal:basic_search": [
        { "entity_id": 704, "version_id": 704, "relevance": 0.013727446 },
        …
    ],
    "_links": {
        "self": { … },
        "curies": { … }
    }
}

See this post in Medium with some additional information.