Cross store searching. Best practices?

[Asger Jensen]

I have a scenario where an enduser is required to be able to search in
a number of stores at the same time. What is the best approach for
this? I have approx 40 stores, representing distinct business
entities, with approx 500k products.

I can see two basic approaches, but I wonder which is best, and I hope
someone can enlighten me, before I go off on a wild goosechase:

1) Custom search bean.
Pros: Easy to do, and ignore storeid when searching.
Cons: Need to re-invent all the functionality from
catEntrySearchListDataBean regarding ANY ALL EXACT, Case insensitive
etc.


2) Somehow hack/fix/break the catEntrySearchListDataBean to search
across all stores/all catalogs, by removing the storeId and categoryId
from the predicate list.
Pros: Gets to keep all pre-existing functionality.
Cons: Nasty surprise when next release of the framework rolls around.


Another consideration :
I'm not quite sure what the lifecycle of the
catEntrySearchListDataBean is. When i'm moving through search result
page by page, is the search query run again and again? Or is it clever
enough to cache the search result (the catEntryIds), and only resolve
the CatEntryAccessBeans for the 20 items that I'm interested in?

Also, are the CatEntryAccessBeans shared/cached between users doing
searches at the same time? It seems this bean is somewhat heavyweight
to activate.

Thanks in advance
/Asger

[Asger Jensen]

Oh,

I also looked at the StoreLocatorDataBean which apparently can be used
indirectly to perform the search, by looking for shops with products
matching a few basic search criteria, but

a) It doesn't inherit from SearchDataBean, thus cannot be extended in
the same way as catEntrySearchListDatBean
b) It only supports (at least documented) a few product search
properties (shortdescription,name,etc). No attribute searches.
c) I couldn't get it to work :/