SUIT

The Search User Interface Toolkit, or SUIT, is a library for creating search applications on top of the index in an Attivio, Elasticsearch or Solr installation. For more information on Attivio, please visit our website at http://www.attivio.com.

Working with the SUIT Library

To build an application using the SUIT library, we strongly recommend that you fork the companion repository, searchui, from our GitHub. The Search UI project imports the SUIT library and builds a search application that uses the React components and other classes in SUIT. Further documentation on the Search UI layer can be found in its repository.

The SUIT Library’s Contents

SUIT consists of three main types of classes: the React-based components used to render the user interface and interact with the lower-layer of classes, a set of API classes which includes code that makes calls to the Attivio server’s REST API to perform tasks such as querying your index, and a set of utility classes used both by the library and by the application-level code.

SUIT’s Components

The UI components in the SUIT library are built on top of the React library. There are many resources on the web for learning more about React, but a good starting point is the React library’s own website.

The individual components are documented in their source files. Most of the components are used in various ways in the code in the Search UI application’s pages, as well—you can see there how they are combined in real life.

The documentation of individual components, as well as some more basic examples of their use can be seen in the style guide. You can build and serve it dynamically using the npm run styleguide:serve command and then pointing your browser to http://localhost:6060 to see the resulting interactive website. Alternatively, you can run npm run styleguide to build a static copy to put on a server somewhere. It’s useful because you can not only see the components but modify their configuration in real time, right in your browser.

SUIT’s API Layer

The API layer includes both classes that implement the methods used to talk to the Attivio platform and others that model the objects used by the APIs. In general, there are components (see above) which encapsulate all of the functionality of the API classes. However, you can see documentation for each of them in its source file. The class you’ll likely find the most interesting is Search, which performs all queries to the back end.

SUIT’s Utility Classes

Like the API classes, the utility classes are mostly used by the component classes and you will probably only access them indirectly. For details about the methods in each one, however, feel free to check out the documentation in the sources.

Building the SUIT Library

In general, as a user of the SUIT library, you shouldn’t need to make any changes to it or build it yourself. If you are interested in submitting a pull request for a bug, for example, you may want to build it. In this case, you can use the folllowing commands:

Command	Description
npm run clean	Cleans the build products from your copy of the library.
npm run build	Performs a build of the library.
npm run start	Builds the library and watches for changes, rebuilding as they are found.
npm run test	Runs the suite of tests for the library.
npm run test:coverage	Generates a report of test coverage for the library.
npm run test:watch	Continuously runs the suite of tests for the library, watching for changes and re-running as they are found.

You may find it helpful to make use of NPM’s link functionality to facilitate seeing changes you make to the SUIT library code in the front-end application code that uses it, particularly in conjunction with the npm run start command. See the NPM documentation for details about doing this.

Contributing

To report an issue or contribute, see CONTRIBUTING.md