With the advent of the new SAP Community Network platform, people have been wondering where the old SDN forums have gone. To this end, there’s a very useful “Forum Finder for the New SCN” which details the forum names, along with links to their new URL homes.

I thought it would be a nice exercise to take one of the SAPUI5 controls for a spin, namely the SearchField. It has a great many options, and wraps some jQuery functions to provide a comfortable way to expose ‘intellisense’ style results as you type. It’s over there on the right, in the sidebar.

var oSdnSearch = new sap.ui.commons.SearchField("sdnSearch", { startSuggestion: 2, search: function (oEvent) { var topic = oEvent.getParameter("query"); window.open(oSdnAreaMap[topic], '_blank'); }, suggest: doSuggest });

Simple as that. I’ve pulled the SDN Forum names and URLs into an object oSdnAreaMap, and have a doSuggest() function that handles the suggest event by deriving matches and filling the search results.

This was a short hack started on the hotel room balcony and finished off in the airport. One thing I haven’t got to the bottom of yet is controlling the number of displayed matches. Hope to get that nailed down soon.

Update 30 Mar 2012

After some collaboration with Ethan Jewett I’ve put the code on github, and it now also matches anywhere in the string, rather than the match being anchored at the start. Share and enjoy!

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