Introduction to search index capabilities

Order Search built on Elasticsearch, offers an indexing and search capability, which is highly available, horizontally scalable, allows faster retrieval and provides near real time availability.

Sterling Order Management System Software uses the Sterling Search Index feature to integrate with Order Search, and index the transactional data in Order Search. Sterling Order Management System Software provides a built-in integration for the ‘Order’ entity. Whenever an order is created or modified in Sterling Order Management System Software an outline of the order is saved in Order Search. This showcases the latest state of an order in Order Search that you can search for without depending on Sterling Order Management System Software. And therefore, Order Search becomes the single source of visibility for all orders that are fulfilled through Sterling Order Management System Software.

To create an order outline template, you can configure an order and related attributes that are defined in the entity models for Order Header, Order Line, Payment, Person Info, Order Status, and so on. The built-in integration retrieves an order outline data based on this template and sends to Order Search. This data is saved in Order Search against the unique identifiers and primary key of an order in the Sterling Order Management System Software data model. You can retrieve this data anytime by using APIs provided in Order Search.

It is recommended that you include attributes needed for your business such as displaying order and related information in an e-commerce user interface without depending on Sterling Order Management System Software, and any attribute needed to make subsequent update calls to Sterling Order Management System Software and so on in the outline template. However, large outline document increases the processing time and the number of propagation to Order Search. Basically, if you include an attribute that is no longer needed in the outline template, it can cause unnecessary updates. However, if the outline template is chosen wisely and appropriately, then you can depend on the search results from Order Search for most of your business needs.

The Order Search component is also capable of indexing a set of attributes from the data it receives to support various search criteria in an efficient manner for your business. The set of indexable attributes with appropriate specifications define an index schema and conveys the underlying Elasticsearch to index the data based on these specifications. To define an index schema, you can choose the commonly used searchable attributes, attributes that require sorting, and so on from the order outline template and then create an ‘order’ index in Order Search by using this index schema. When you receive an order outline data from Sterling Order Management System Software, Order Search saves this data and indexes against the selected attributes in the ‘order’ index. Based on indexed attribute values, you can quickly retrieve orders by using the search APIs provided by Order Search.