Remository includes powerful search logic. It can be accessed within the component. Normally, a search box is shown on all the main Remository pages. The search looks at the file title, short description and description. There is a Remository search plugin that can be installed (it is included in Remsearch - see below) that integrates with the standard Joomla search component to enable files in the repository to be included in site searches.

A user will not necessarily see all files. What they can see is controlled by two things. One is the configuration of the containers. You can control which groups of people can download files in a container. There is also a Remository option for whether users can see containers where they cannot download. If it is set to “yes” then files will be found, even if the user cannot download them. But if it is set to “No” then files will not be seen if they are in a container where the user cannot download.

With recent versions of Joomla, a new complication has arisen. It is the “advanced” search, also known as “finder”. Unfortunately, it seems to be designed to work with moderate quantities of articles and similar. It is not ideal for a file repository. Some users have used Remository to build file repositories containing tens of thousands of items. The “finder” indexing process does not work well in this situation.

There is also an issue relating to the ability to control whether users can see the files in a container. This can be changed for a large number of files in a moment, with a simple update. However, there is no practical way to force the “finder” index to be updated in this case.

Even in a repository with tens of thousands of files, the Remository search plugin is very efficient and will give a result in a few seconds. It also caters for the exact situation with permissions, and immediately reacts to changes. For these reasons, it seems that for all but very small repositories, the old style search works best.

As it is not being provided with new installations of Joomla, an installable package with a search component and related module and plugins has been created as Remsearch. It can be downloaded from https://remository.com/downloads/A-New-Remository/. Prior to doing this, I looked at software available from the Joomla project, but it appeared that the old style search in the Github repository does not work. Remsearch will be withdrawn if an official Joomla equivalent is made easily available.