Search functiontionality is disabled (text box not selectable)

[anenadic]

The search box at the top only provides for search on the actual page and not search across the whole lesson site. Is this the intended behaviour?

[zkamvar]

Hi @anenadic,

Thank you for bringing this up! I've transferred this to the workbench repository since this particular issue is for the workbench as a whole as opposed to the documentation.

Short answer

The search functionality is currently disabled and I apologise for not flagging it as disabled. I am working on implementing it in an accessible manner, but it may take some time.

Long answer

The search bar exists because we asked for it during the design of the frontend. The designer added the search bar with a button and the frontend contractors placed it in the lesson, but without functionality behind it because how exactly search results would be displayed was unclear.

That being said, our infrastructure is built on top of {pkgdown} and search functionality does exist in {pkgdown}, as you can see from the {sandpaper} package website, but we do not import any of their JavaScript or CSS the structure of the website is so different.

I thought I opened an issue to add functionality to the search button, but it turns out that I only generated a commit that begins the process with a note about what I found:

While Bootstrap 5 may have search enabled through their forms, it turns
out that it's difficult for me to find documentation for this specific
task. Moreover, the pkgdown searchbar never had a button associated with
the search... and for good reason: the search is dynamic; it does not
bring you to a page with your search results; it gives you the search
results as a dropdown menu, so you go to your result by clicking
"enter". It makes sense! I think we can provide a blank page for search
results, but we will need to test out the accessibility for sure.

The steps for me to resolve this are:

• add "disabled" attribute to the search form to clearly indicate that it is not available for input
• add pkgdown::build_search() after all the pages are built in sandpaper:::build_site()
• decide if a search button is needed or if the form output will be sufficient (this is where I might need some help with screenreader testing from @brynnelliott)
• implement the search form JavaScript and CSS in {varnish}

[zkamvar]

Note about the search functionality, I think the appropriate path is to take the approach of Mozilla Developer N(etwork)? and implement the search field that does two things:

1. creates a dynamic dropdown search as you type
2. appends a "didn't find what you were looking for" item at the end to link to a search page
3. button click sends to a search page

The search page they have looks like this: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/search?q=localStorage

[elichad]

@zkamvar I just ran into this as well. Do you plan to work on this soon? If not, it might be better to hide the search box in the meantime to reduce confusion.

[martinosorb]

Is there currently another smart way of searching within a whole lesson? This is useful for maintainers. Cheers

[zkamvar]

At the moment, a good way to search the whole lesson is to visit the all in one page, which is located at the bottom of the schedule: https://carpentries.github.io/workbench/transition-guide.html#aio-instructor

The page is always called "aio.html", so you can visit there directly by adding /aio.html to the URL. For example , this is the all in one page for the workbench tutorial: https://carpentries.github.io/sandpaper-docs/aio.html

[zkamvar]

And I apologise on my delay with this issue. There are many things that have come up since it was opened -_-

[martinosorb]

No worries, I'm aware you have a lot of things to think about. The one-page version works perfectly, thank you.