preparing-data.md

Preparing data

Text analysis is perfect when you want to alter how Elasticsearch deals with a query, or with the data when it is being indexed. However, sometimes you do not necessarily want to meddle with analyzer, but rather just make a quick change to the data before it is indexed, perhaps conditionally.

For this, Explorer gives you the ability to 'prepare' your searchable data. To use this you will need to implement the JeroenG\Explorer\Application\BePrepared interface on your model and add the prepare($data) function. The data that is passed to the prepare function is what Laravel Scout generates in the toSearchableArray() method.

The prepared data might be very simple:

public function prepare(array $searchable): array
{
    $searchable['name'] = ucfirst($searchable['name']);

    return $searchable;
}

Or you could use something like Laravel's pipelines to do much more complex stuff:

public function prepare(array $searchable): array
{
    $searchable['content'] = (new Illuminate\Pipeline\Pipeline())
                ->send($searchable['content'])
                ->through([
                    App\Formatters\ConvertMarkdown::class,              
                    App\Formatters\StripTags::class,
                    App\Formatters\EncodeEmoji::class,
                ])
                ->thenReturn();

    return $searchable;
}