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.

Note

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

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.

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

5.2. Customization

5.2.1. Configure the search templates

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

# 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

# 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:

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

5.2.2. Configure the default search result actions

In general the search result generates a link to the show action of an item or displayed as a text if the show route is disabled or you haven’t the required permission. You can change this behavior by overriding the option

# config/packages/sonata_admin.yaml

sonata_admin:
    global_search:
        admin_route: edit

5.2.3. 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: