Discovering open source WPF components - Orc.Search

In the discovering open source WPF components series, I will look into useful open source components that can be used to create WPF apps. This weeks component is Orc.Search.

Most applications sooner or later need a search functionality. Since most .net applications work with models (objects containing the actual information users want to search for), it might be hard to implement such functionality.

A great open-source search engine for indexing and searching is Lucene.net, but it requires quite some work to implement it from scratch in an application. Orc.Search provides a great wrapper around Lucene.net in 3 simple steps. Of course it also comes with xaml controls to easily add search boxes with status indicators to your applications.

Step 1: decorate your models with the right attributes

public class Person
{
    [SearchableProperty(SearchName = "firstname")]
    public string FirstName { get; set; }

    [SearchableProperty(SearchName = "lastname")]
    public string LastName { get; set; }

    public int Age { get; set; }
}

An alternative to using attributes is to implement a custom IMetadataProvider (you are never forced to only use attributes).

Step 2: Add the projects to the search service

searchService.AddObjects(persons.Select(x => new ReflectionSearchable(x));

Step 3: Use the Search method

Once the objects are indexed, you can easily use the search method to search for any values:

var results = searchService.Search("my query");

Enjoy your results!