Helper Child Nodes: User-Friendly Search Results and Preventing Full Node Views

Note: This article was written for ez.no and has been edited by Peter Keung.

In an eZ Publish site structure, there are often nodes that hold information shown as a part of the full view of a different, master node. Showing the full view of the former nodes themselves or getting them as search results is usually unwanted. This is common in forums and articles with comments. If you have worked on a large eZ Publish project, you have probably used such nodes without referring to them by a specific name. This article explains what we call “helper nodes” and also explores the template and content model issues involved, relating specifically to search results.

The target audience for this article is developers with advanced knowledge of eZ Publish.

There are two ways to associate helper nodes with a master node:

• Via an explicit relation: using object relation or object relations attributes, using general object relations or <embed> tags in an XML text block.
• Using the tree structure: putting helper nodes below the master node.

In this article, we discuss the latter type, where helper nodes are children of a master node. If you are familiar with helper nodes and the issues involved, you can skip directly to the section named "Indexing child nodes in their master nodes" on the Search results page. Otherwise, we recommend that you read this article in the order that it is written.

Extensions used

The extensions as they are introduced in this article are for eZ Publish 3 releases and can be downloaded from our downloads section. However, the same extensions for eZ Publish 4 can be downloaded from the same location.