Written by Anjolaoluwa Adebayo-Oyetoro✏️
One of the most important parts of building any website or web app is its search functionality. Search functionality helps to make interactions with products easier and faster. We live in a world where every millisecond counts and a bad search experience could lead to users discontinuing the use of a product.
In this tutorial, we will :
- Take a look at Algolia and how we can use it to build instant search experiences for our application
- See how the Algolia InstantSearch library helps remove the problems associated with building and maintaining a search-as-you-type system
- See how InstantSearch helps improve the performance and efficiency of our search system
- Also, look at how to get started implementing Algolia InstantSearch in your application by building a movie search app
The final version of our app should look something like this:
Prerequisites:
The following prerequisites are needed to follow along with this tutorial:
- Have Node.js 8.0 or higher and Yarn/ npm 5.2 or higher installed on your PC
- Basic knowledge of JavaScript and React fundamentals
- An account with Algolia
Getting started
What is instant search?
It’s a predictive search feature that tries to anticipate and guess the most likely completion of what a user’s search query is and displays information that is relevant to the user’s input instantly with every keystroke inputted in the search box.
What is Algolia?
According to its website:
Algolia is search-as-a-service solution that helps you build real-time search into your app with customizable, prebuilt widgets along with tools that make building search systems easy.
How does Algolia InstantSearch work?
To understand how the Algolia InstantSearch service works we need to know the following key terms:
-
INDEX
— The set of information which will be used in our application for querying and searching. It is a collection ofRECORDS
-
RECORDS
— An array of JSON objects, these objects contain data/information that is eventually shown to the user. They are composed ofATTRIBUTES
-
ATTRIBUTES
— Key-value pair contents that describe their parentRECORD
The InstantSearch logic
The InstantSearch package interacts with the Algolia API, when a user enters a keystroke in the search box, a request is made to the Algolia servers, which in turn compares the search query to the available INDEX
and filters through the RECORD
for the ones that contain the relevant ATTRIBUTE
then sends back the RECORDS
that are relevant to the search term.
Algolia provides us with preconfigured UI widgets that serve as building blocks for our Algolia powered app. These widgets leverage upon the Algolia API to help ease interacting with and rendering data from the Algolia API.
The widgets we will be using in this tutorial are:
-
InstantSearch
—This widget is the parent component of all Algolia Instant search widgets. It interfaces directly with the Algolia API -
SearchBox
— This component houses the search bar and provides a means to get user queries -
RefinementList
— This is a widget that provides a set of filters to refine the query results data gotten from the Algolia API according to their attributes -
Hits
— This is a widget that displays all the results for a particular query -
HighLights
— This widget helps with highlighting the attribute of a query result -
HitsPerPage
— This widget is used to regulate the number of results to be shown per page -
Pagination
— This widget is used to changeHit
pages -
Stats
— This widget shows the amount of time it took to retrieve data and the number of hits that match a search query
For a full list of the React InstantSearch widgets and what they do, refer to this API reference.
Building our movie search app
We will be using the create-react-app boilerplate to bootstrap our project so we don’t have to worry about configurations to get started with using Algolia for instant search in your application.
Run this command to create a new React app with the boilerplate:
#Using NPM
npx create-react-app react-instant
#or, Using Yarn
yarn create react-app react-instant
Then change into the directory for our project using the command:
cd react-instant
Next, we install the React instant search package using the command:
npm install react-instantsearch-dom
#or, Using Yarn
yarn add react-instantsearch-dom
We will also need to install the algoliasearch package, Algoliasearch is an HTTP client that communicates with the Algolia API.
Run the command:
npm install algoliasearch
or
yarn add algoliasearch
Create a folder named components
in your src
folder, this folder will house the Search
component of our app.
We will need to remove the unneeded contents of our boilerplate, open your src/App.js
and delete the unnecessary code. It should look something like this:
import React from 'react';
import './App.css';
function App() {
return (
<div className="App">
</div>
);
}
export default App;
Proceed to create a file named Search.js
in your components folder and include the following in the file:
# /src/components/Search.js
import React from 'react';
function Search () {
return (
);
}
export default Search;
Then we proceed to import algoliasearch
and the InstantSearch
component into our Search.js
file:
import algoliasearch from 'algoliasearch'
import { InstantSearch } from 'react-instantsearch-dom'
After importing, initialize it in the search component:
return(
<InstantSearch>
</InstantSearch>
);
We then proceed to configure our app to use our API key, app ID and index name.
For the purpose of this tutorial, we will be using an already configured index provided by Algolia for test purposes that includes all the data we would need to create our app.
The value for these configurations should be replaced with the one you got from your Algolia dashboard.
Include the following in your Search.js
file, just after your import statements.
const searchClient = algoliasearch("latency", "6be0576ff61c053d5f9a3225e2a90f76")
Add the searchClient
as an attribute of your InstantSearch
component and include your indexName
as an attribute with a value of movies
.
function Search() {
return (
< InstantSearch searchClient={searchClient} indexName="movies" >
</InstantSearch >
);
....
Next, we create a Header
component that will contain our SearchBox
and import the SearchBox
component from InstantSearch:
import { InstantSearch, SearchBox } from 'react-instantsearch-dom';
....
const Header = () => (
<header className="header">
<SearchBox
className="search-bar"
translations={{placeholder: 'Search for Movies'}}
/>
</header>
)
....
Then we proceed to configure our Hits
to receive results from the Algolia API:
const Hit = ({ hit }) => (
<a href={"/"} >
<div className="card">
<div className="card-image">
<img src={hit.image} alt={hit.name} className="image"/>
</div>
<div className="card-contents">
<Highlight attribute="title" hit={hit} className="card-title" />
<Highlight attribute="year" hit={hit} className="card-year"/>
<div className="card-rating">Rating: {hit.rating}</div>
<div className="card-genre"> <span>{hit.genre[0]}</span> <span>{hit.genre[1]}</span> </div>
</div>
</div>
</a>
);
Our Hits
component receives hit
as a prop then we would use the hit
props to interact with our preconfigured index data.
Next, we create a content component that will house every content that would be displayed in our app and we import the Hits
, Hightlight
, Pagination
and the SortBy
component into it:
import { InstantSearch, SearchBox, Hits, Highlight, Stats, SortBy, Pagination } from 'react-instantsearch-dom';
....
const Content = () => (
<main>
<div className="information">
<div className="stats"> <Stats/> </div>
<div className="">
<SortBy defaultRefinement="movies"
items={[
{ value: 'movies', label: 'Most Relevant' },
]}
/>
</div>
</div>
<Hits hitComponent={Hit} />
<div> <Pagination/> </div>
</main>
);
....
The contents of your Search.js
file should now look similar to this:
import React from 'react';
import algoliasearch from 'algoliasearch'
import { InstantSearch, SearchBox, Hits, Highlight, Stats, SortBy, Pagination } from 'react-instantsearch-dom';
const searchClient = algoliasearch("latency", "6be0576ff61c053d5f9a3225e2a90f76")
function Search() {
return (
< InstantSearch searchClient={searchClient} indexName="movies" >
<Header />
<div className="body-content">
<Content/>
</div>
</InstantSearch >
);
};
const Header = () => (
<header className="header">
<SearchBox
className="search-bar"
translations={{ placeholder: 'Search for Movies' }}
/>
</header>
);
const Hit = ({ hit }) => (
<a href={"/"} >
<div className="card">
<div className="card-image">
<img src={hit.image} alt={hit.name} className="image"/>
</div>
<div className="card-contents">
<Highlight attribute="title" hit={hit} className="card-title" />
<Highlight attribute="year" hit={hit} className="card-year"/>
<div className="card-rating">Rating: {hit.rating}</div>
<div className="card-genre"> <span>{hit.genre[0]}</span> <span>{hit.genre[1]}</span> </div>
</div>
</div>
</a>
);
const Content = () => (
<main>
<div className="information">
<div className="stats"> <Stats/> </div>
<div className="">
<SortBy defaultRefinement="movies"
items={[
{ value: 'movies', label: 'Most Relevant' },
]}
/>
</div>
</div>
<Hits hitComponent={Hit} />
<div> <Pagination/></div>
</main>
);
export default Search;
Create a Search.css
file inside your components folder and include the following styles to make our app look beautiful:
.header{
padding-top: 4em;
width: 100%;
display: flex;
background-color: #dce2e9;
height: 20vh
}
.search-bar{
display: flex;
justify-content: center;
width: 100%
}
input{
min-width: 500px;
border: none;
border-radius: .5em;
padding: 15px
}
.ais-SearchBox-submit{
width: 100px;
padding: 15px;
color: #c4c4c4
}
.ais-SearchBox-reset{
display: none
}
main{
width: 100%;
}
ul{
width: 100%;
display: flex;
flex-wrap: wrap
}
li{
list-style-type: none;
}
.ais-Hits-item{
width: 32%;
}
.card{
background-color: #f9f9f9;
display: flex;
border-radius: 10px;
margin:20px;
padding: 15px;
box-shadow: 0 4px 8px 0 rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.2), 0 6px 20px 0 rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.19);
}
.card-contents{
margin-left: 20px;
display: flex;
align-content: center;
flex-direction: column;
justify-content: space-between
}
.card-title{
font-weight: bold
}
.card-genre > span{
font-size: 15px;
width: 20px;
padding: 4px;
background-color: #c4c4c4
}
.information{
padding-top: 10px;
display: flex;
justify-content: space-around;
font-size: 11px
}
a{
text-decoration: none
}
a:visited{
color: black;
}
.ais-Pagination-list{
display: flex;
justify-content: center
}
.ais-Pagination-item{
margin: 5px
}
Then import the Search
component into our App.js
file:
....
import Search from './components/Search'
....
<div className="App">
<Search/>
</div>
....
Run the following command on your terminal:
#using NPM
npm start
#or,using yarn
yarn start
Our App should look similar to this:
And when we type in a search query it refines our movie cards accordingly.
Conclusion
We’ve seen how to configure Algolia in our React app. To learn more about Algolia search services you can check out its documentation.
You can check out the repository to this tutorial on GitHub also a deployed version of the working app.
Editor's note: Seeing something wrong with this post? You can find the correct version here.
Plug: LogRocket, a DVR for web apps
LogRocket is a frontend logging tool that lets you replay problems as if they happened in your own browser. Instead of guessing why errors happen, or asking users for screenshots and log dumps, LogRocket lets you replay the session to quickly understand what went wrong. It works perfectly with any app, regardless of framework, and has plugins to log additional context from Redux, Vuex, and @ngrx/store.
In addition to logging Redux actions and state, LogRocket records console logs, JavaScript errors, stacktraces, network requests/responses with headers + bodies, browser metadata, and custom logs. It also instruments the DOM to record the HTML and CSS on the page, recreating pixel-perfect videos of even the most complex single-page apps.
Try it for free.
The post How to use Algolia for instant search appeared first on LogRocket Blog.
Top comments (0)