Enhancing search with additional functions in a custom page class?

[gornycreative]

I noticed the search template and search page do not seem to be alterable by defining a custom page class.

If I try creating a page class file where

class SearchPage extends Page {

it does not appear to effect the Search page class at all - the page still appears as ProcessWire/Page and none of the public functions I define can be used.

Is this a feature of having a page that uses a Process or is it because it is a system file, or is there a different class it should extend?

[gornycreative]

Looking into it more, I have come to the conclusion that the Search page uses the admin template and as a result falls outside the public facing page class framework. Even though the output from the controller/view is a ProcessWire/Page class, there is no way to extend the pageclass because it is the Process that dominates the function of the page.

If I wanted to modify the Search workflow I could hook into it, but because I actually want to grab url segments and run some query magic to convert them into a complex query to pass to search, I think I will need to set up a unique page and pageclass to do that.

Hopefully someone with more knowledge of the admin side can chime in.

[gornycreative]

Funny thing is, the migrate function will still run and if I set it up as a magicpage for rockmigrations it still functions in that capacity. It's just the page class itself that does not get recognized when loading the search page.

[gornycreative]

I didn't realize there are technically two pages created in the back end for search and both of them are hidden and have system ids - 300 and 1000,

There's a search page under root '/' that's id 1000 and a search page under /*adminhome*/page/ that is id 300 - for admin search.

When I used the name selector by itself in the Tracy console before it grabbed the admin search page but later when I used the template selector it grabbed the public search page.

The public facing search page applied the custom SearchPage page class. I'm in business.

id=300, name=search, template=admin, = the backend search page/process

id=1000, name=search, template=search = the frontend search page/process - and the custom page class gets applied to this page.