---
myst:
  html_meta:
    "description": "Block field contribute to `searchableText`"
    "property=og:description": "Block field contribute to `searchableText`"
    "property=og:title": "Block field contribute to `searchableText`"
    "keywords": "Volto, Plone, Searchable Text, Indexing, Catalog"
---

# Block field contribute to `searchableText`

Sometimes we want the blocks to be "searchable", to participate in the
SearchableText extracted for that content type.

There are two solutions for this, the simple but inneficient, and the
efficient but complicated.

## Client side solution
The block provides the data to be indexed in its `searchableText` attribute:

{
  "@type": "image",
  "align": "center",
  "alt": "Plone Conference 2021 logo",
  "searchableText": "Plone Conference 2021 logo",
  "size": "l",
  "url": "https://2021.ploneconf.org/images/logoandfamiliesalt.svg"
}
This is the easy solution.

## Server side solution

For each new block, you need to write an adapter that will extract the searchable text from the block information:

```python
@implementer(IBlockSearchableText)
@adapter(IBlocks, IBrowserRequest)
class ImageSearchableText(object):
    def __init__(self, context, request):
        self.context = context
        self.request = request

    def __call__(self, block_value):
        return block_value['alt_text']
```

See `plone.restapi.interfaces.IBlockSearchableText` for details. The `__call__` methods needs to return a string, for the text to be indexed.

This adapter needs to be registered as a named adapter, where the name is the same as the block type (its @type property from the block value):

```xml
<adapter name="image" factory=".indexers.ImageBlockSearchableText" />
```