In this episode, we're moving our autocomplete functionality from using a static result set to actually connecting to our MeliSearch search engine and displaying live results. The process begins with installing and importing the @meilisearch/autocomplete-client
package, which allows us to easily hook up Algolia's Autocomplete with our MeliSearch backend.
We start by creating a new MeliSearch client with our URL and master key. Once that's done, we replace the old static getItems
implementation so it returns results fetched in real-time from our MeliSearch index. We briefly talk about how this setup could handle multiple search engines, but for now, we're focused on a single users index.
Next, we enhance the display of our search results. We switch from basic list items to a more user-friendly UI by injecting avatar images and using anchor tags for each result. We use Tailwind classes (thanks to Laravel Breeze) to style these results, making the search look nice and clean. At the end, we have a search interface that's fast, styled, and pulls live data—much better than our initial setup!
We wrap up by mentioning that in the next episode, we'll expand this functionality to search and display multiple sources, such as courses in addition to users.