Context Search Record

I know that everyone is familiar with the Search Record and Add Search Records in a component as it is one the first thing you might learn when you attend a PeopleSoft Technical training or interview. However, people who work with the latest Tools releases might have noticed a new search record type in the component properties, known as Context Search Records. This search record is not among the well-known list of the PeopleSoft technologies.

I will cover an overview on the new kind of search record introduced by PeopleSoft. Before that I would let the dust settle, this new record is no way going to impact any of your existing functionalities or applications. This new Search Record is solely intended for related content linkage.

You might have seen many pages with Search Records having no keys (mostly INSTALLATION). Some applications instead of using a PeopleSoft standard Search Page, they create their own Search Page and hence tend to use INSTALLATION (or other similar records) as the search record. So when you really create a related content to this component, you won’t be able to pass or map any parameters. To tackle this scenario, PeopleSoft has introduced this new Search Record called Context Search Record. If you define a record as Context Search Record in the component properties, even though your default Search Record does not have any keys, all the fields in the Context Search Record will be listed in the related content configuration page to map. Thus allowing you to pass some values to the context component. If your component has a default Search Record with keys, then the keys of that record will be listed for mapping. The earlier one will be used for mapping only if your default Search Record lacks any search keys.