Mark Stott
Oct 1, 2021
  7281
(2 votes)

Setting Up Search & Navigation in .NET 5.0

UPDATE: The documentation has now been updated and can be found here: https://world.optimizely.com/documentation/developer-guides/search-navigation/getting-started/creating-your-project/

Optimizely CMS for .NET 5.0 is a very exciting thing.  Recently the .NET Core Preview documentation was archived and some of that documentation was merged into the live developer guides. Optimizely have a huge amount of developer documentation and it's going to take a while for this content to be updated for .NET 5.0.  Sadly the current documentation for Optimizely Search and Navigation is still focused on the .NET 4.x world

1. Add the EPiServer.Find.CMS nuget package to your .NET 5.0 solution.

2. Generate a new Search and Navigation index at https://find.episerver.com/

3. Configure the index details in app.config...

When you create the index, you will be shown this snippet to add to your web.config:

<configuration>
    <configSections>
        <section
            name="episerver.find" type="EPiServer.Find.Configuration, EPiServer.Find" requirePermission="false"/>
    </configSections>
    <episerver.find
        serviceUrl="https://demo01.find.episerver.net/RXQGZ5QpXU9cuRSN2181hqA77ZFrUq2e/"
        defaultIndex="yourname_indexname"/>
</configuration> 

You will instead add this to appsettings.json like so:

{
    "EPiServer": {
        "Find": {
            "ServiceUrl": "https://demo01.find.episerver.net/RXQGZ5QpXU9cuRSN2181hqA77ZFrUq2e/",
            "DefaultIndex": "yourname_indexname"
        } 
    } 
}

4. Configure your startup.cs to include the find configuration:

public void ConfigureServices(IServiceCollection services)
{
    services.AddCmsAspNetIdentity<ApplicationUser>();
    services.AddMvc();
    services.AddCms();
    services.AddFind();
 }

You should now have everything you need to write your search queries as normal:

var searchResult = _findClient.Search<SitePageData>()
                              .For(request.SearchText)
                              .UsingSynonyms()
                              .ApplyBestBets()
                              .Skip(skip)
                              .Take(pageSize)
                              .GetContentResult();
Oct 01, 2021

Comments

Scott Reed
Scott Reed Oct 1, 2021 04:41 PM

You can also do it in code (if you so wish) such as if you wanted you local 4th index to be in key vault or something

        public static void SetupSearchAndNavigation(this IServiceCollection services)
        {
            services.Configure<EPiServer.Find.FindOptions>(options =>
            {
                options.DefaultIndex = "INDEX";
                options.ServiceUrl = "URL";
            });

            services.AddCms();
            services.AddFind();
        }

Mark Stott
Mark Stott Oct 3, 2021 04:26 PM

Thank you for the suggestion Scott, it certainly provides alternatives, especially if the client is self hosted like a number of our own clients.  With the DXP platform, none of the index or connection string secrets are actually held anywhere near source code; so I'd expect not to apply this in code but by transforms with empty values again.

Scott Reed
Scott Reed Oct 4, 2021 07:53 AM

Yes that's why I was mentioned the 4th index which is outside of the DXP and usually used for local development or a test server. The startup.cs file as it support querying is local development can give us options for complex configuration options should be need to use them.

Antti Alasvuo
Antti Alasvuo Oct 5, 2021 03:13 PM

For future reference, the configuration of CMS 12+ version and Find, is hidden on this page: https://world.optimizely.com/documentation/developer-guides/search-navigation/getting-started/creating-your-project/ and scroll down to title "Configuring Search & Navigation for the website" (at least at the moment ;)).

Mark Stott
Mark Stott Oct 5, 2021 03:56 PM

Thank you for the update Anttl, at the time of writing that page was still only showing the .NET 4.8 CMS 11 version of the guidance :)

Deepmala S
Deepmala S Mar 9, 2023 10:02 AM

Thanks for this blog, I was finding this solution and it's really helpful and working too properly.

Mark Stott
Mark Stott Mar 9, 2023 11:56 AM

Thank you, I'm glad this has proved helpful after all this time :)

Please login to comment.
Latest blogs
Is the most powerful AI model really the best value?

Artificial Intelligence is already becoming part of everyday software development. Developers now use AI tools to generate code, write documentatio...

K Khan | May 16, 2026

Optimizely London Dev Meetup 2026

Well, everyone, it's that time of the year again, and we have another London Developer meet up coming for this summer. The date is set for the 2nd ...

Scott Reed | May 15, 2026

Building a Custom RAG for Optimizely Opal

How to design a standalone RAG service for documents that don't belong in Optimizely One, and expose it to Opal and other AI tools without coupling...

Michał Mitas | May 14, 2026 |

Building a Custom RAG for Optimizely Opal

Opal's built-in knowledge is limited to content inside Optimizely One. Here's how to design a custom RAG service for documents that live outside th...

Michał Mitas | May 14, 2026 |