PolicyCenter support for Contact searches

PolicyCenter enables you to search both for locally stored contacts and for contacts stored externally in ContactManager.

To configure Contact search in PolicyCenter, you edit the following files in Guidewire Studio for PolicyCenter:

  • search-config.xml – Defines search criteria for addresses.
  • gw.plugin.contact.ab1000.ABContactSystemPlugin – The plugin implementation used to call ContactManager web services. This plugin implementation has a searchContacts method that calls the ContactManager ABContactAPI.searchContact method.
  • gw.plugin.contact.ab1000.ABContactAPISearchCriteriaEnhancement – The class that defines additional PolicyCenter search criteria to be used with ContactManager contact searches. The class enhances the ContactManager web service ABContactAPISearchCriteria, adding a sync method that is used by ABContactSystemPlugin.searchContacts.
  • gw.plugin.contact.ab1000.ABContactAPISearchResultEnhancement – The class that defines the search result fields that PolicyCenter displays in the search results returned from ContactManager.
  • ContactSearchCriteria.eix – You can extend this entity by creating a ContactSearchCriteria.etx file. This entity defines the search criteria that are shown to the user in the search screens. If you add search criteria to ContactSearchCriteria.etx, you must also add them to ABContactAPISearchCriteriaEnhancement. PolicyCenter uses both files.
  • gw.plugin.contact.impl.ContactSearchCriteriaEnhancement – The class in which the contact search method for both internal and external contact search is defined. The primary contact search method in this class is performSearch.
  • ContactSearchScreen.pcf – This PCF file displays the contact search criteria. It also instantiates an instance of the ContactSearchCriteria entity and uses it as a parameter to its doSearch method defined in the Code tab. That method calls the method ContactSearchCriteriaEnhancement.performSearch.

In the base configuration, PolicyCenter uses the Address fields defined in search-config.xml to search only for address fields. PolicyCenter does not use this file to configure searching for Contact fields.

To search for contacts stored in ContactManager, PolicyCenter uses the plugin implementation gw.plugin.contact.ab1000.ABContactSystemPlugin. This class’s searchContacts method instantiates an ABContactAPISearchCriteria object and calls its sync method, which in turn calls the ContactManager web service method ABContactAPI.searchContact. The PolicyCenter searchContacts method returns data from the ABContactAPISearchResult Gosu objects returned by the ContactManager searchContact method. PolicyCenter shows these returned objects as contacts and their fields in the search results.

One class where you can customize this contact search behavior is gw.plugin.contact.ab1000.ABContactAPISearchCriteriaEnhancement. This class extends the search criteria defined in the ContactManager web service ABContactAPISearchCriteria. For example, the sync method specifically searches for the client tag. If you want to search for other tags, you can modify the code of this method to do so.

A corresponding class in which you can customize contact search behavior is gw.plugin.contact.ab1000.ABContactAPISearchResultEnhancement. This class defines extensions to the search results returned by ContactManager. It enhances the ContactManager web service ABContactAPISearchResult.

See also