General questions about data portals

[Anthony Weaver]

I'm just starting to look into setting up a data portal with search for a project here.  I have a search index setup and data ingested.  I also setup a github hosted portal based on the Globus template.  I'm at the point where I'd like to start customizing that portal but there doesn't seem to be any documentation about theming and adding other content.  For example, I'd like to add multiple search boxes.  The metadata comes from images and includes things like the location of the image, the date the image was captured, what's in the image (animal, person, animal and person) and so I'd like to  have somewhat robust search boxes to do something like all the images from location X between date1 and date2 with animals.  It'd  also be nice to use a custom banner image add other text (like a description of the project) and so on.

Is there documentation for that sort of customization?  Can it even be done with github hosted portals?  Thank you for any responses 

[Joe Bottigliero]

Hi Anthony,

We're working on expanding our documentation, but I've gone ahead and added references to some example portals to the search portal template; These do not include examples for theming, but should at least provide example configurations to enable certain capabilities. I'll provide a bit more context and examples specific to your questions below. 

There is a lot to cover here (and I'll be the first to admit it's not as discoverable as we'd like!) – I'd be happy to continue to discuss specifics related to your configuration here, in a direct email, or via sup...@globus.org.

Best,

Joe

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### Custom Content

The most basic changes that can be made using the static.json file would be updating your content.headline and adding a content.logo (example). For more advanced customization, the Example : Serverless Data Portal with Custom Content applies to the Search Portal as well.

### Theming 

Theming at the static.json configuration level is very simplistic at the moment. The most basic modification is swapping the application's "primary" color palette. This can be done by adding a theme.colors.primary color object to data.attributes (example - result). You can generate a palette using a tool like Smart Swatch. 

### Facets

Regarding multiple search boxes and the desire for more robust search, the portal does have built-in support for term-based facets that can be applied as filters to the generated search query. It sounds like that might meet your requirements for allowing filtering by location and classification (e.g., "animal", "person").

The template includes facets for "Tags" and "Region" that configuration could be modified so something like the code below (I've also attached an image of the configuration and resulting UI).

{

"globus": {

"search": {

"index": "<YOUR_SEARCH_INDEX_UUID",

"facets": [

{

"name": "Location",

"field_name": "location", // The property on the document where the value exists.

"type": "terms",

"size": 10 // The number of terms to display, feel free to modify this to fit your needs.

},

{

"name": "Category",

"field_name": "category",

"type": "terms",

"size": 10

}

]

}

}

}