Backend and Infrastructure

Index Reference Fields for Drupal 8, 9, and 10

Reference field types, such as taxonomy term fields, paragraph fields, or plain entity reference fields, refer to a completely separate entity within the site. This makes search configuration complicated as the typical scope of a search crawl is on a per-node (really a per-entity) basis. Fortunately there are known strategies to index these fields with ease.

In this tutorial, we'll:

  • Describe why reference types pose a particular challenge to indexing
  • Discuss the importance of display modes in indexing
  • Highlight how the Rendered HTML Output field can be used to index paragraphs

By the end of this tutorial you should be able to add reference fields to your Search API Index and allow users to search their contents in the correct context.