Is there a way to define index per site in SXA

Question

There is a lot of reasons why I would like to have a separate index per site (or even per language). Some of them are:

• separation of data
• keeping the index small which increase performance
• not extending fields number limit per index (e.g.: Azure Search provider have 1000 fields limit)
• separate index per language would give the possibility to define a different list of stop words for Solr

Is that possible in SXA?

Answer 1

Yes, it's possible. There is a new feature in SXA 1.7.1 which allows you to create an index per site and per language (and of course per database).

On the Site Definition (/sitecore/content/YOUR_TENANT/YOUR_SITE/Settings/Site Grouping/YOUR_SITE) item you will find a new field in the Indexing section:

This field is using a special convention which allows SXA to resolve custom indexes. In the above example I've for example:

• sitecore_sxa_web_en_index defined for Web database and English language
• sitecore_sxa_web_es_index specified for master database and Spanish language
• sitecore_sxa_master_en_index specified for master database and English language

There is one more useful convention which can be used. If I would something like that:

This will allow you to specify an index per database regardless of a language.

Things to remember:

• you need to define those indexes in config files by your own
• you need to ensure that those indexes exist in your search provider (e.g.: in case of Solr, you need to create cores manually) In other words - SXA is using indexes which exists and it's not creating them automatically for you.