Nested filtering with EPiServer Find

Some have already noticed one of the x2find mebers, Nested2Find, that enables nested object mappings and filtering to the EPiServer Find API. I would like to give a short description of what it does and how it can help you in some filtering scenarios.

Sometimes we need to be able to filter documents based on matching a specific object in a lists of complex objects on the document. Say for instance that we have documents that have a list of all authors that have contributed. Authors that all have a set of properties such as name and address. We then want to find all documents where one of the authors match a specific set of criterias, say all documents that have a swedish author named Henrik. This is what Nested2Find enables you to do. It lets you define nested lists of complex objects on a document for which you then later can specify a matching criteria when querying.

How to use the Nested2Find extension

Add the nested conventions to the conventions:

client.Conventions.AddNestedConventions();

Create an object containing a NestedList<> of objects (NestedList<> is simply a typed List<>):

public class Document
{
    public Document()
    {
        Authors = new NestedList&lt;Author&gt;();
    }
    public string Title { get; set; }
    public NestedList&lt;Author&gt; Authors { get; set; }
    public string Body { get; set; }
}

public class Author
{
    public string Name { get; set; }
    public string Address { get; set; }
    public string Country { get; set; }
}

Index and start filtering:

result = client.Search&lt;Document&gt;()
             .Filter(x => x.Authors, p => p.Name.Match("Henrik") &amp; p.Country.Match("Sweden"))
             .GetResult();

or:

result = client.Search&lt;Document&gt;()
            .Filter(x => x.Authors.MatchItem(p => p.FirstName.Match("Henrik") &amp; p.Country.Match("Sweden")))
            .GetResult();

I hope you may find this useful when making your site awesome with EPiServer Find!</span>