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Data providers

Additional Developer Resources

The Mapbox Search SDK for Android lets developers to attach their own places, POIs, and address information to SearchEngine via data providers. Engines will index the provided data and use this data during forward geocoding and category search requests.

Indexable record​

IndexableRecord stores place, POI, and address information that can later be used by both users and the Search SDK. The Search SDK uses information from IndexableRecord to prepare the data provider engine and construct search results.

Retrieve IndexableRecord from SearchResult
You can retrieve IndexableRecord from SearchResult.indexableRecord, which is non null if SearchResult has been constructed from IndexableRecord:kotlinval searchResult: SearchResult = // ...val record = searchResult?.indexableRecord

Data provider​

IndexableDataProvider has two main responsibilities:

  1. Store IndexableRecords and provide read and write access so the Search SDK is able to retrieve and add records.
  2. Keep the data provider engine up to date to guarantee all indexable records are available during search.
Priority
Each indexable record has an associated priority that helps search engines determine the ranking of search results constructed from indexable records. The priority of a record is equal to the priority of the data provider which is determined by IndexableDataProvider.priority property.

Data provider engine​

IndexableDataProviderEngine is a search index that can be used by multiple search engines during search requests after processing. If you want search engines to be able to search across your data, add all necessary indexable records to the engine during the IndexableDataProvider.registerIndexableDataProviderEngine() operation or later, when data will become available:

class CustomDataProvider : IndexableDataProvider<CustomIndexableRecord> {

    private val dataProviderEngines: MutableList<IndexableDataProviderEngine> = mutableListOf()
    private val records: MutableList<IndexableRecord> = mutableListOf()

    /**
     * Invoked when `CustomDataProvider` is registered in a `SearchEngine`.
     */
    override fun registerIndexableDataProviderEngine(
        dataProviderEngine: IndexableDataProviderEngine,
        executor: Executor,
        callback: CompletionCallback<Unit>
    ): AsyncOperationTask {
        synchronized(this) {
            dataProviderEngines.add(dataProviderEngine)
            dataProviderEngine.upsertAll(records)
        }
        executor.execute {
            callback.onComplete(Unit)
        }
        return CompletedAsyncOperationTask
    }

    /**
     * Invoked when search records become available.
     */
    private fun onDataLoaded(customData: List<CustomIndexableRecord>) {
        synchronized(this) {
            records.addAll(customData)
            dataProviderEngines.forEach { engine ->
                engine.upsertAll(records)
            }
        }
    }

    // ...

    private object CompletedAsyncOperationTask : AsyncOperationTask {

        override val isDone: Boolean
            get() = true

        override val isCancelled: Boolean
            get() = false

        override fun cancel() {
            // Do nothing
        }
    }
}

IndexableDataProviderEngine is thread-safe and can be called from different threads.

Consider using data provider engine only from background thread
Even though in most cases changing the index used in the data provider engine takes a few milliseconds, sometimes it may take longer for operation to complete (for example, when the data provider engine is used by a search engine or when user adds more than 10,000 records).

Built-in data providers​

The Mapbox Search SDK for Android has built-in data providers that are attached to each instance of the SearchEngine created with SearchEngine.createSearchEngineWithBuiltInDataProviders(). If an instance of the SearchEngine is instantiated with SearchEngine.createSearchEngine(), it will not have any data providers registered by default.

The Search SDK provides two built-in data providers:

  • Search history - data provider which is designed to store the most recent search results selected on a device.
  • Favorites - data provider which is designed to store user's favorite places, addresses, POIs.

You will learn more about these data providers later in this guide.

Custom data providers​

The Mapbox Search SDK for Android allows you create your own data providers if you want to introduce custom POIs or addresses to the search engine during the search.

EXAMPLE
Custom data provider

Search across POIs provided by custom data provider

First, you should create a record class that will store all the data about places, POIs, and addresses that you have. Implement an IndexableRecord interface. We recommend using a Kotlin data class and @Parcelize annotation from the kotlin-parcelize plugin to ease implementation:

@Parcelize
data class CustomRecord(
    override val id: String,
    override val name: String,
    override val coordinate: Point,
    override val type: SearchResultType,
    override val descriptionText: String?,
    override val address: SearchAddress?,
    override val routablePoints: List<RoutablePoint>?,
    override val categories: List<String>?,
    override val makiIcon: String?,
    override val metadata: SearchResultMetadata?,
    override val indexTokens: List<String>,
) : IndexableRecord

Then, implement an IndexableDataProvider interface that will be used as a source of custom records and will update the search engine index associated with the provided IndexableDataProviderEngine instance.

Keep data provider engine up-to-date
Search engines will only be able to search across custom data if you've added custom data to IndexableDataProviderEngine. Make sure you've provided your data to the data provider engine once data is available. Read more about data provider engines in data provider engine section.

And finally, register custom data provider in your SearchEngine:

val searchEngine: SearchEngine = //...
val customDataProvider: CustomDataProvider = // ...
val task = searchEngine.registerDataProvider(
    customDataProvider,
    callback = object : CompletionCallback<Unit> {
        override fun onComplete(result: Unit) {
        }

        override fun onError(e: Exception) {
        }
    }
)
Unregister data providers when they are not needed
If you want to remove your custom data from search engine indexes, unregister your custom data provider from the SearchEngine:kotlinval task = searchEngine.unregisterDataProvider( customDataProvider, callback = object : CompletionCallback<Unit> { override fun onComplete(result: Unit) { } override fun onError(e: Exception) { } })

Indexable records exclusion​

Indexable records can be excluded from a search response by modifying SearchOptions.ignoreIndexableRecords and CategorySearchOptions.ignoreIndexableRecords, for example,

val searchOption = SearchOptions(ignoreIndexableRecords = true)
val categorySearchOptions = CategorySearchOptions(ignoreIndexableRecords = true)
Additional Developer Resources
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