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Sitecore PowerShell Extension with Coveo

By Simon Langevin — September 12, 2016

The excellent Sitecore PowerShell Extension allows you to return items from your index and display its properties in a friendly manner, all of this at a much faster speed than using the Content Search API. This is, of course, just one function of that rich extension.

Coveo has a REST Search API which gives you the opportunity to send complex queries, but the advantage of the SPE is its usability across all your search providers. For example, I might want to compare the amount of results returned between Lucene, Solr, and Coveo indexes with the same script.

Example with Lucene

Thanks to CJ Morgan at BrainJocks for providing me with a basic SPE script with several examples. This will work with Lucene and I believe also with Solr. It uses the sitecore_master_index with some custom GUIDs and templates.

# This will return all items that have the template planogram within the the index sitecore_master
Find-Item -Index "sitecore_master" -Criteria @{Filter = "Equals"; Field = "_templatename"; Value = "Planogram"} 
 
# This will show two items: one being master, and one being web.
Find-Item -Index "sitecore_master" -Criteria @{Filter = "Contains"; Field = "_uniqueid"; Value = "{005ac360-4daa-4de7-b158-88b193f8f5bc}"}
 
# This is an example of how to do multiple filters at once
$filterParams = @(
        @{Filter = "Contains"; Field = "_uniqueid"; Value = "{005ac360-4daa-4de7-b158-88b193f8f5bc}"},
        @{Filter = "Equals"; Field = "_database"; Value = "web"}
    )   
Find-Item -Index "sitecore_master" -Criteria $filterParams
 
# This will return only a certain number of items for the sitecore_master index
Find-Item -Index "sitecore_master" -First 1000
 
# This will allow you to view the properties of the index so I can do more work on it
# Powershell screen has a buffer, so using Format-Table -Autosize to show it horizontally
Find-Item -Index "sitecore_master" -First 10 | Select-Object -Property *
 
# This will allow you to see the fields value of the index item
# which is the information you will use in the Field variable for the Filter
Find-Item -Index "sitecore_master" -First 1 | select -expand "Fields"
 
# This will search by a particular version and will only allow the descendants of a certain item
$filterParams = @(
        @{Filter = "Equals"; Field = "_version"; Value = "2"}
        @{Filter = "DescendantOf"; Value = (Get-Item master: -ID "{B03731AD-B04C-41B6-944C-D21BBC5926D4}") }
    )
 
Find-Item -Index "sitecore_master" -Criteria $filterParams -First 10
 
 
# When the items are returned using Find-Item they are not true Sitecore Items but instead
# are "Sitecore.ContentSearch.SearchTypes.SearchResultItem" items.  To make them into regular Sitecore items, you have to add 
# Initialize-Item at the end of the results, as such.
$filterParams = @(
        @{Filter = "Equals"; Field = "_version"; Value = "2"}
        @{Filter = "DescendantOf"; Value = (Get-Item master: -ID "{B03731AD-B04C-41B6-944C-D21BBC5926D4}") }
    )
 
Find-Item -Index "sitecore_master" -Criteria $filterParams -First 10 | Initialize-Item
 
 
# Filter by other parameters as well
$filterParams = @(
        @{Filter = "StartsWith"; Field = "_fullpath"; Value = "/sitecore/content/Markets/301UnitedStates_301/Snippets/Detailed Business Reviews"}
        @{Filter = "Equals"; Field = "_language"; Value = "en" }
        @{Filter = "Equals"; Field = "_template"; Value = "6bf27a02e6064608b7d3f02ea3a30955"}
    )
 
$item = Find-Item -Index "sitecore_master" -Criteria $filterParams -First 10 #| Initialize-Item
$item
#$item.Fields | Format-List -Property *

Example with Coveo

Coveo has a few unique twists in the way it handles fields. This new example is based on the coveo_master_index , which is created by default when installing the package. I will explain the changes in the next section.

# This will return all items that have the template article group within the the index Coveo Master
Find-Item -Index "Coveo_master_index" -Criteria @{Filter = "Equals"; Field = "_templatename"; Value = "Article Group"} 

# This will return a single item
Find-Item -Index "Coveo_master_index" -Criteria @{Filter = "Equals"; Field = "_uniqueid"; Value = "{A5CDBC19-FFEA-4801-81A6-2B87F318B275}"}

# This is an example of how to do multiple filters at once
$filterParams = @(
        @{Filter = "Equals"; Field = "_uniqueid"; Value = "{A5CDBC19-FFEA-4801-81A6-2B87F318B275}"},
        @{Filter = "Equals"; Field = "_database"; Value = "web"}
    )
Find-Item -Index "Coveo_web_index" -Criteria $filterParams -First 10

# This will return only a certain number of items for the selected index
Find-Item -Index "Coveo_master_index" -First 100

# This will allow you to view the properties of the index so I can do more work on it
# Powershell screen has a buffer, so using Format-Table -Autosize to show it horizontally
Find-Item -Index "Coveo_master_index" -First 10 | Select-Object -Property *

# This will allow you to see the fields value of the index item
# which is the information you will use in the Field variable for the Filter
Find-Item -Index "Coveo_master_index" -First 1 | select -expand "Fields"

# This will search by a particular version and will only allow the descendants of a certain item
$filterParams = @(
        @{Filter = "Equals"; Field = "_version"; Value = "2"}
        @{Filter = "DescendantOf"; Value = (Get-Item master: -ID "{110D559F-DEA5-42EA-9C1C-8A5DF7E70EF9}") }
    )
Find-Item -Index "Coveo_master_index" -Criteria $filterParams -First 10


# When the items are returned using Find-Item they are not true Sitecore Items but instead
# are "Sitecore.ContentSearch.SearchTypes.SearchResultItem" items. To make them into regular Sitecore items, you have to add 
# Initialize-Item at the end of the results, as such.
$filterParams = @(
        @{Filter = "Equals"; Field = "_version"; Value = "2"}
        @{Filter = "DescendantOf"; Value = (Get-Item master: -ID "{110D559F-DEA5-42EA-9C1C-8A5DF7E70EF9}") }
    )
Find-Item -Index "Coveo_master_index" -Criteria $filterParams -First 10 | Initialize-Item


# Filter by other parameters as well
$filterParams = @(
        @{Filter = "StartsWith"; Field = "_fullpath"; Value = "/sitecore/content/Home/Team/Brandon-Royal"}
        @{Filter = "Equals"; Field = "_language"; Value = "en" }
        @{Filter = "Equals"; Field = "_template"; Value = "97963d48bd0646ca8279cd2ba3c7aa36"}
    )
$item = Find-Item -Index "Coveo_master_index" -Criteria $filterParams -First 10 | Initialize-Item
$item
$item.Fields | Format-List -Property *

What’s different?

Contains is considered an advanced field query in Coveo, which required the field to be a facet. I would not recommend _uniqueid as a facet since it contains a lot of unique values, so I changed the operator to an Equals.
Coveo usually creates one index per database, which means that the _uniqueid field will return a single value against the Coveo_master_index, not two like in the Lucene example.
When returning a specific amount of results, the Lucene example used a First 1000. I changed it to 100, since Coveo, by default, will return less values for performance reasons. You can increase this value in the configuration file: https://developers.coveo.com/x/NwHvAQ
_template does not contain any dashes when indexed by Coveo. However, templateid will . So I removed the dashes in my query, but I could also simply change the field for templateid.

And that’s it! Thanks again to Cognifide for creating the module and to anyone who contributed to it.

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Sitecore PowerShell Extension with Coveo

Example with Lucene

Example with Coveo

What’s different?