Is there a way to append an indexed field to a glass mapper object?

Question

I'm generating a custom sitewide search by indexing the rendered HTML of the pages on my site.

Some pages will have a title and description field defined to display in the results, however, some wont and would benefit from using the indexed content to display a snippet of the search result.

is there a way to append the page content via glass mapper, that is, on item creation glass mapper binds the corresponding document in the index to the generated object?

One solution would be to create a custom mapper that inserts the indexed field. Unfortunately, Im unsure how to access the corresponding lucene document from the item.

Answer 1

I'd be reluctant to use a custom mapper to insert this indexed content for each item because it would affect the performance of every item's creation (and therefore your entire site).

Instead, although it's not automatic, I'd recommend the following approach:

Add your "fallback" logic at the business/service layer instead

var currentPage = mySitecoreContext.GetCurrentItem<IMyModel>();
string pageTitle = currentPage.Title;
if (string.IsNullOrEmpty(pageTitle))
{
    // execute a search for (x => x.Id = currentPage.Id) and get the indexed field's value
}