Special collections - Staff listing with JSON

In the previus examples we've been using content from "web collections" that are collected by configuring start pages and then a spider follows links as it traverses your website. With "special collections" however, the content is fed directly into Funnelback via feeds, apis, databases, etc. and content is then mapped in Funnelback. Content such as the VCU Faculty and Staff, VCU social media feeds and News and Events all come from special collections.

The following are ids and sources of VCU special collections:

Special collection types can have additional metadata mapped to the results that you can use in different ways. Metadata will be specific to each special collection. In the most basic way you might pass the parameter in as a part of your html form. In more advanced ways you may use it in your json response like we are doing in the example below. Analyze the following url and json response:

Html version: https://search.vcu.edu/s/search.html?clive=vcu-directory&collection=vcu-meta&meta_personOu_phrase=Application+Services

Json version: https://search.vcu.edu/s/search.json?clive=vcu-directory&collection=vcu-meta&meta_personOu_phrase=Application+Services

In the example url above, we are searching just the vcu-directory collection and are passing a special "meta_CLASSNAME" (in this case meta_personOu) parameter to the query and telling it to match exactly with the phrase "Application Services." This will pull back all people who are a part of Application Services. You can refer to the Funnelback documentation on Metadata class types for how to query or sort by metadata in different ways.

Try it out

In this example we will modify the previous vcu-json.html example slightly to pull all staff in the "Application Services" Ou and then filter them out based on the input query.