Hook for Adding to Empty Search Results - Wikitech-l

13 Dec 2013

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