5. Search

The admin comes with a basic global search available in the upper navigation menu. The search iterates over admin classes and looks for filters implementing the Sonata\AdminBundle\Search\SearchableFilterInterface interface with the method isSearchEnabled() returning true. If you are using SonataDoctrineORMBundle, the Sonata\DoctrineORMAdminBundle\Filter\StringFilter filter is searchable and relies on a global_search option.

5.1. Disabling the search by admin

You can disable the search for a whole admin by setting the global_search attribute to false at your admin definition using the tag sonata.admin.

• XML

  <service id="app.admin.post" class="App\Admin\PostAdmin">
      <tag name="sonata.admin" global_search="false" manager_type="orm" group="Content" label="Post"/>
      <argument/>
      <argument>App\Entity\Post</argument>
      <argument/>
  </service>
  

5.2. Customization

The main action is using the template @SonataAdmin/Core/search.html.twig. And each search is handled by a block, the template for the block is @SonataAdmin/Block/block_search_result.html.twig.

The default template values can be configured in the configuration section

• YAML

  # config/packages/sonata_admin.yaml
  
  sonata_admin:
      templates:
          # other configuration options
          search:              '@SonataAdmin/Core/search.html.twig'
          search_result_block: '@SonataAdmin/Block/block_search_result.html.twig'
  

You also need to configure the block in the sonata block config

• YAML

  # config/packages/sonata_admin.yaml
  
  sonata_block:
      blocks:
          sonata.admin.block.search_result:
              contexts: [admin]
  

You can also configure the block template per admin while defining the admin:

• XML

  <service id="app.admin.post" class="App\Admin\PostAdmin">
        <tag name="sonata.admin" manager_type="orm" group="Content" label="Post"/>
        <argument/>
        <argument>App\Entity\Post</argument>
        <argument/>
        <call method="setTemplate">
            <argument>search_result_block</argument>
            <argument>@SonataPost/Block/block_search_result.html.twig</argument>
        </call>
    </service>
  

5.2.1. Configure the default search result action

In general the search result generates a link to the edit action of an item or is using the show action, if the edit route is disabled or you haven’t the required permission. You can change this behavior by overriding the searchResultActions property. The defined action list will we checked successive until a route with the required permissions exists. If no route is found, the item will be displayed as a text:

// src/Admin/PersonAdmin.php

final class PersonAdmin extends AbstractAdmin
{
    protected $searchResultActions = ['edit', 'show'];
}

5.3. Performance

The current implementation can be expensive if you have a lot of entities as the resulting query does a LIKE %query% OR LIKE %query%…

Note

There is a work in progress to use an async JavaScript solution to better load data from the database.

5.4. Customize visibility of empty result boxes

By default all the admin boxes are shown in search results and it looks like this:

We can fade out the boxes that have no results with:

# config/packages/sonata_admin.yaml

sonata_admin:
    global_search:
        empty_boxes: fade

and it looks like this:

The third option is to hide the empty boxes:

# config/packages/sonata_admin.yaml

sonata_admin:
    global_search:
        empty_boxes: hide

and it looks like this: