Find a school

Find a school in Hampshire is a feature which allows the public to search for schools in Hampshire and view details on these schools. 

The data source for the school details are JSON files produced by a PHP API on the education server (www.education.hants.gov.uk) from a MySQL database on the Eddie server.

The feature is made up of the following components:

• School details page - this page pulls data from a web service and display the details for the school that matches the DfES number specified in the query string
• School listing page - a page that lists all schools for the GSA to crawl
• GSA search (including GSA collection and search rendering)

Please see example image at foot of page

Create the school details page

1. Create a page of type 'HCC_SchoolDetailsPage' -  this page will pull data from a web service and display the details for the school that matches the DFESNO specified in the query string.
2. Edit the page fields; field and button labels and links

Create the schools listing page

In order to get the schools indexed by the GSA search, a page needs to be created that lists all the schools.

1. Create a new School Details page of type 'HCC_Listing' and add the 'AllSchoolsLinks' rendering; this page will pull data from a web service and display a list of all schools
2. Point the 'Parent item' field on the Schools Listing page (in the 'Listing Page Detail' section) to the School Details page (this page needs to have the 'follow' and 'noindex' metadata tags)

Index the pages

1. Create a new collection inside the GSA search and get the GSA server to index the schools
2. Create a new item of type 'GSACollection' inside Sitecore and set the name of the collection to be the previously created collection from GSA

Create the search page

1. Create a new page and add the 'GSASearch' rendering on it
2. Create a new item of type GSASearchInstance, select the previously created 'GSACollection' and fill in the rest of the fields as required
3. Point the rendering datasource to the previously created 'GSACollection'

Governor Vacancies search page

This page is essentially a search page as described above, with the 'GSASearch' rendering on it, using the same GSACollection for the datasource as the Schools Search page. Create a new item of type GSASearchInstance and set fields as required.

For the Governor Vacancies search page, the search needs to prefilter the results so that only schools that have Governor vacancies are displayed. This is achieved by creating a HeaderMetaGroup item that corresponds to the meta tag on the SchoolDetails page - in this case the meta tag is 'governorVacancies'. Two child items must be created for this HeaderMetaGroup item: 'true' and 'false', corresponding to the values for the meta tag itself.

Once these have been created, the prefiltering criteria can be configured on the GSASearchInstance item, selecting the 'true' child item beneath the 'governorVacancies' meta group to ensure only schools with a governorVacancies meta tag set to 'true' are returned in the search results.

• Concept
• Alpha
• Beta
• Release