Basic Customization Tutorial

This tutorial shows how to customize a corpus in the BlackLab Frontend by adding a custom JavaScript file and changing the displayed title of your documents.

Steps

1. Create the config directory for your corpus.
   By default, this is /etc/projectconfigs/. If your corpus is called example, your config directory will be /etc/projectconfigs/example/. Use your custom paths if necessary.

2. Copy the default search.xml into your corpus directory.
   You can find the default at src/main/resources/interface-default/search.xml.
   Copy it to:

   /etc/projectconfigs/example/search.xml

3. Add a config option to include a custom script on the search page.
   Edit your search.xml and add:

   <CustomJs page="search">${request:corpusPath}/static/js/custom.search.js</CustomJs>

4. Create a matching JavaScript file.
   Create the file:

   /etc/projectconfigs/example/static/js/custom.search.js

5. Add the following snippet to your custom.search.js:

   vuexModules.ui.getState().results.shared.getDocumentSummary = function(metadata, specialFields) {
     return 'This is everything we know about the document: ' + JSON.stringify(metadata);
   }

6. Restart your server and perform a search in your corpus to see the changes.
   For example: http://localhost:8080/blacklab-frontend/example/search/docs?patt=""

   NOTE: You don't need to restart the application constantly. Simply set cache=false in the main blacklab-frontend.properties config file to disable caching of files by the server.