I have an extension using the ArticleFromTitle hook to generate pages for components of a large system we operate. There are approximately 6000 components at the moment with static inventory and config data in a database and live status data in a number of other systems. We are using MediaWiki as a historical maintenance knowledge-base for the staff. With this extension, we can integrate all the data for each device in one place. We can hit MyNS:DeviceName and get a page that describes a device and that page can link to other pages in the main namespace that techs create with vendor details, model info, manuals, etc. We can even keep a talk page for each device. Very handy.
Trouble now is I want to be able to find devices using the search feature. SpecialSearchResults looked promising but that only gets called when there is at least one match in "normal" pages. So, I looked at SpecialSearchNoResults but that doesn't allow me to add to the empty results. Doesn't anyone have a suggestion on how I could go about this? I really want to avoid generating the text of pages externally periodically and loading them into the wiki using the importTextFile maintenance script.
The only other thought I had was to extend the SearchMySQL class and change $wgSearchType but I'm hoping to avoid that.
Any ideas?
--Paul