Dynamically generating complex pre-refined search result page URLs

I while ago I blogged about creating a static link to a pre-refined (pre-filtered) search page. This post follows that idea to it’s natural conclusion by providing a number of JavaScript functions which can dynamically create search result page URLs. These URLs will look something like this:

https://tenant.sharepoint.com/search#Default=%7B%22k%22%3A%22article%22%2C%22r%22%3A%5B%7B%22n%22%3A%22RefinableString20%22%2C%22t%22%3A%5B%22%5C%22%C7%82%C7%824275696c64%5C%22%22%5D%2C%22o%22%3A%22OR%22%2C%22k%22%3Afalse%2C%22m%22%3A%7B%22%5C%22%C7%82%C7%824275696c64%5C%22%22%3A%22Build%22%7D%7D%2C%7B%22n%22%3A%22RefinableString21%22%2C%22t%22%3A%5B%22%5C%22%C7%82%C7%824c6f6e646f6e%5C%22%22%5D%2C%22o%22%3A%22OR%22%2C%22k%22%3Afalse%2C%22m%22%3A%7B%22%5C%22%C7%82%C7%824c6f6e646f6e%5C%22%22%3A%22London%22%7D%7D%5D%7D

The provided scripts support filtering on:

• a search term
• multiple refiners
• multiple values for a refiner, or
• any combination of the above

It would be worth reading the intro of my earlier article to get a better understanding of what is happening in the snippets provided in this post.

OF NOTE:

• As the most common usage will surely be to produce search result page URLs that are refined on a single value, I have written an ‘overload’ function that simplifies calling the method in this scenario
• The ‘search page URL’ can be provided to the functions in a number of ways including:
  • “/search” : to the web. The default page for that web. In the case of an Enterprise Search Centre this will be the ‘Everything’ search results page
  • “/search/Pages/peopleresults.aspx” : to the page
  • Use an absolute URL if you are out of the context of the SharePoint Online tenant in which the search page resides. This will be true for provider hosted add-ins (apps)
  • If you are writing your own refiner, then pass an empty string and set window.location.hash to the result of the function
• This script has no dependencies on other libraries (jQuery, SP.js, etc)
• The hex encoded string must be UTF-8 encoded. JavaScript is natively UTF-16. The particular scenario where this raised an issue for me was the wide-ampersand character which is often used instead of a standard ampersand as it is XML friendly. ‘unescape’ returns a UTF-8 encoded string and is used to force the required encoding. Thanks to ecmanaut for this solution
• I took inspiration for the stringToHex method from a post by pussard

The functions:

var getPreRefinedSearchPageUrl = function (searchPageUrl, searchTerm, managedPropertyName, managedPropertyValue) {
  return getComplexPreRefinedSearchPageUrl({
    searchPageUrl: searchPageUrl,
    searchTerm: searchTerm,
    refiners: [
      {
        managedPropertyName: managedPropertyName,
        managedPropertyValues: [
          managedPropertyValue
        ]
      }
    ]
  });
};

// input:
// {
//   searchPageUrl: "/search/Pages/results.aspx",
//   searchTerm: "",
//   refiners: [
//     {
//       managedPropertyName: "RefinableString08",
//       managedPropertyValues: [
//         "Human Resources"
//       ]
//     }
//   ]
// }
var getComplexPreRefinedSearchPageUrl = function (data) {
  var searchObj = {
    "k": data.searchTerm,
    "r": []
  };
  for (var i = 0; i < data.refiners.length; i++) {
    var refiner = data.refiners[i];
    var searchObjRefiner = {
      "n": refiner.managedPropertyName,
      "t": [],
      "o": "OR",
      "k": false,
      "m": {}
    };
    for (var j = 0; j < refiner.managedPropertyValues.length; j++) {
      var refinerValue = refiner.managedPropertyValues[j];
      // Force UTF8 encoding to handle special characters, specifically full-width ampersand
      var managedPropertyValueUTF8 = unescape(encodeURIComponent(refinerValue)); 
      var managedPropertyValueHex = stringToHex(managedPropertyValueUTF8);
      var managedPropertyValueHexToken = "\"ǂǂ" + managedPropertyValueHex + "\"";
      searchObjRefiner.t.push(managedPropertyValueHexToken);
      searchObjRefiner.m[managedPropertyValueHexToken] = refinerValue;
      searchObj.r.push(searchObjRefiner);
    }
  }
  var seachObjString = JSON.stringify(searchObj);
  var searchObjEncodedString = encodeURIComponent(seachObjString);
  var url = data.searchPageUrl + "#Default=" + searchObjEncodedString;
  return url;
};

var stringToHex = function (tmp) {
  var d2h = function (d) {
    return d.toString(16);
  };
  var str = '',
    i = 0,
    tmp_len = tmp.length,
    c;
  for (; i < tmp_len; i += 1) {
    c = tmp.charCodeAt(i);
    str += d2h(c);
  }
  return str;
};

These are examples of how to call the function that are defined above.

var complexUrl = getComplexPreRefinedSearchPageUrl({
  searchPageUrl: "/search/Pages/results.aspx",
  searchTerm: "article",
  refiners: [
    {
      managedPropertyName: "RefinableString20",
      managedPropertyValues: [
        "Build", "Land"
      ]
    },
    {
      managedPropertyName: "RefinableString21",
      managedPropertyValues: [
        "London"
      ]
    }
  ]
});

var basicUrl = getPreRefinedSearchPageUrl("/search/Pages/results.aspx", "", "RefinableString20", "Build");

Paul.

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