REQUEST A DEMO

Search your Clarify/Dovetail data

Dovetail Seeker is our search engine for Clarify/Dovetail. One of the things I really like about Seeker is that its easy to take advantage of its search results from different applications. Because Seeker is a web service, its relatively easy to have applications use this search service.

For example, we’ve added Search capabilities to Dovetail Agent and to Dovetail SelfService. We’ve also added Search to our external website, and Search can also be added to the Clarify Classic Client. 

Many applications can use the same instance of Seeker for searching:

 

architecture

 

Request/Response

Each of these applications simply make an HTTP request to Dovetail Seeker, and the results are returned in a JSON format. JSON (JavaScript Object Notation) is a lightweight data-interchange format that is easy for humans to read and write, and also easy for machines to parse and generate.

seeker_request_response

1. The application makes an HTTP request to the Dovetail Seeker web application with the search terms.

GET http://myserver/seeker/search.castle?query=Error

2. Dovetail Seeker responds with JSON containing the results. Here's an example of a JSON response:

{"SearchResults":[{"Score":1,"Domain":"case","Id":"7","Title":"Case with error in the title","Summary":"Case History"}],

"TotalNumberOfResults":1,

"StartResultIndex":0,

"SearchQuery":"Error"}

The application can then parse the JSON, and display it however desired. JSON parsers are readily and freely available in most programming languages.

Applications

The following is a few examples of different applications integrated with Seeker:

  • Dovetail Agent
  • Dovetail SelfService
  • Clarify Classic Client
  • ASP.NET web application

Lets take a quick look at each of these.

Search within Dovetail Agent

Within Dovetail Agent, agents can search for cases, solutions, change requests, and RMAs (Part Requests)


agent_search

Search within Dovetail SelfService

Within SelfService, customers can search public solutions, and their own cases.

selfservice_search

Search within the Clarify Classic Client

Within the Clarify Client, agents can search for cases, solutions, change requests, and RMAs (Part Requests)

clarify_search

Search within a web application

Here, we've added search capabilities to our website (http://www.dovetailsoftware.com/), exposing our public knowledgebase (solutions) to our customers and partners.

DovetailSoftware.com is an ASP.NET web application written in C#.

dovetailsoftwaredotcom_search

Search within your application

The same method we’ve used in the examples above can be used to Search from your own application(s). It could be a Windows application, a web application, smart client application, etc.

 

Extensibility

One of the other things I really like about Seeker is its extensibility. Via configuration, Seeker can easily be extended to search additional (including custom) fields (such as a custom field on the case or solution), and it can also search any object in the system, including custom objects. For example, if you have a custom widget table, and want to be able to search for widgets, Seeker can handle that. This takes us into a whole other blog post – hopefully I’ll get to that post soon.

More Info

More details on Seeker are available in the documentation, which is available online.

Kevin also has a couple of blog post with some more details on Seeker.