Using Sitecore SXA Location Search with Azure Search

Question

Our Sitecore Application(9.0.2 with SXA 1.8) is hosted on Azure PaaS and we intend to use Azure Search as the Search provider for our application.

One of the Features that we want to implement is the Sitecore SXA OOTB Location Finder Search similar to the excellent blog post by Michael West - https://michaellwest.blogspot.com/2016/10/build-location-finder-search-using-sxa.html

We are very new to Azure Search and would like understand its capabilities. I read that Sitecore Provider at the moment does not support Geospatial data types, so would want to know if the Sitecore SXA location finder would work as expected with Azure Search if we follow the mentioned article?

Answer 1

SXA extends the default Sitecore Azure Search provider with geospatial features (we simply implemented those features on the SXA side). When the SXA is installed you can e.g.:

• order by distance
• search within area
• Edm.GeographyPoint field type will be present in the index for SXA point of interest item