I'm currently implementing a D6 version of this and finding that I have to do some serious hacking to add support for oneboxes. It just doesn't support it by design.

Given how little love the D6 version of this is getting, I think it's better to shoot for support for this in D7.

Overview of what will likely need to happen:

  • Provide a generic onebox script that generates XML for the Google Appliance to consume. Separate script? Menu Item with query parameters?
  • Prune out ENTOBRESULTS from the result XML
  • Create a onebox theme function:
    <?php theme('google_appliance_onebox_results',$onebox['ONEBOX_NAME'],$title,$number_of_items_to_show)
  • Optionally somehow get the onebox results into a more useful structure. Block?

We could also instead implement a block that performs an additional (identical) query using the onebox's frontend.

Just opening it up to discussion.

Comments

mpgeek’s picture

mpgeek commented

We've actually begun thinking about how we might work oneboxes into the module at my institution. If anyone has more ideas, please chime in.

iamEAP’s picture

iamEAP commented

I've been working some more on this in the 6 version, but these concepts apply in 7.

The problem is that you need a separate script that runs a separate query for each onebox. You can't provide a single script and pass your own query parameters to help build the query because the appliance appends its own query parameters. i.e. you couldn't have a single generic onebox like...

/sites/all/modules/google_appliance/generic_onebox.php

And create different oneboxes like

video_onebox -> sites/all/modules/google_appliance/generic_onebox.php?foo=video
article_onebox -> sites/all/modules/google_appliance/generic_onebox.php?foo=article

Because the appliance appends its own parameters when it calls the onebox script (in particular, "query").

One solution is to make it a menu item...

/google-appliance/onebox/foo/bar

But then for each search query, you're bootrapping Drupal as many times as there are oneboxes, which I don't think is really acceptable.

iamEAP’s picture

iamEAP commented
Status: Active » Closed (won't fix)

Implementing oneboxes generically is either not possible, or prohibitively slow. The best we can do is provide a hook for altering results so that custom modules can do the extra parsing; looks like this is already there, so no action required.

I have one possible improvement that would help custom modules that do this, but I'll open a separate issue for it.

Marking: won't fix.