Advanced Search

The filter sidebar answers “narrow down what I’m looking at.” Advanced search answers a different question: “find me this exact thing, wherever it is in the store.” It’s a form page where a shopper ticks the games they care about, fills in each game’s own fields, and lands on your search page with the matches and a sidebar to refine them. It carries the fields a sidebar never could: rules text, artist, collector number, mana cost, type line, format legality. This page covers how it works and how to set it up.

The short version

• Advanced search is a page you add to your store, built from the theme’s advanced-search template.
• The form is built live from your own catalog through the Sideboard app. The games offered are the games you sell, and the fields under each game are the facets you’ve enabled. Nothing is hardcoded.
• Searching sends the shopper to your search page, so results arrive with the filter sidebar beside them, sorting, real pagination, and an address they can share, bookmark, and hit Back into.
• It needs your store connected to the Sideboard app, and it needs the search page’s Search results come from setting switched to Sideboard search so the hand-off lands somewhere that understands it.

What shoppers see

The game step. Checkboxes for every game you sell. Ticking a game reveals that game’s fields below it, under the game’s own name, and the heading is the point: a filter under “Magic: The Gathering” constrains Magic cards and nothing else. Tick Magic and Lorcana, ask for red under one and amber under the other, and the results are red Magic cards and amber Lorcana cards.

The listing fields. Above the games sit the fields that belong to the listing rather than the card: name, condition, finish, language, price, and in stock. Those apply to everything the search returns, whatever the game.

The deep fields. Under each game, alongside its pick-a-value facets, are the free-text fields with no short list of options to offer, which is exactly why the sidebar can’t carry them: rules text, artist, collector number, mana cost, type line, and format legality. This is where “flying creatures with ‘draw a card’ in the text, legal in Modern” becomes a search a shopper can actually run.

The results. Submitting composes a URL and hands off to your search page. The count above the grid is Sideboard’s real match count, the sidebar is there to refine further, and refining keeps the search: ticking a sidebar checkbox narrows what the form asked for rather than discarding it. A search doesn’t even need a name. “Red mythics under $5” with the name box empty is a perfectly good query.

Setting it up

1. Connect your store to Sideboard if you haven’t. The form asks the app what to offer, so without the connection there’s nothing to build it from.
2. In your Shopify admin, go to Online Store → Pages and add a page. Call it something like “Advanced search”. In that page’s Theme template dropdown, choose advanced-search, then save. (The dropdown only lists templates that exist in your live theme. If you’re running the Sideboard theme, it’s already there.)
3. Switch your search page to Sideboard search. In the theme editor, open your search results page (/search), select the Search results section, and set Search results come from to Sideboard search. This is the engine that understands what the form sends. Leave it on Shopify search and a hand-off falls back to a plain name search that ignores every other field.
4. Add the page to a menu, your header or the sidebar, so shoppers can find it.

New to page templates? Working with Sections explains what a template is and how to assign one to a page.

Choosing which fields appear

The fields under each game come from the same Filters screen that runs your collection sidebar: in your Shopify admin, open Apps → Sideboard → Filters. Every facet has two independent toggles under Show this filter in…, one for Collection filters and one for Advanced search, both on by default. That means you can offer a facet in one place and not the other: keep a niche facet out of the sidebar but let advanced search carry it, or the reverse.

Two things work differently on the advanced-search side:

• Conditions don’t apply. A facet’s conditions gate the collection sidebar, where there’s a collection to test them against. Advanced search has no collection, so a search-enabled facet appears whenever you carry a game that supports it.
• Values still come from your inventory. Just like the sidebar, you don’t manage the options inside a facet. If you don’t stock any Mythics, Mythic isn’t offered.

The Collection filters page covers the rest of the Filters screen: labels, ordering, and value order.

Good to know

• The form adapts on its own. Start selling a new game and it appears in the game step; drop a game and it disappears. There’s nothing on the page to maintain.
• Search results and the sidebar agree. The hand-off lands on the same engine the collection page uses, so counts, in-stock behavior, and facet vocabulary all match what shoppers see elsewhere in the store.
• If the Sideboard app can’t be reached, the page says so instead of showing a dead form, and recovers on its own once the app is back.

Troubleshooting

The advanced-search template isn’t in the page’s template dropdown. Shopify only offers templates that exist in your live theme. If the Sideboard theme isn’t the published one yet, the template won’t be listed.

The form shows an error instead of loading. The page couldn’t reach the Sideboard app. Check that your store is connected and synced.

Searching lands on the search page but ignores everything except the name. The search page is still on Shopify search. Set Search results come from to Sideboard search on the Search results section (step 3 above).

A field I expect is missing. Check the facet’s Advanced search toggle on the Filters screen, and remember values come from your inventory: a facet with nothing to offer for the games you carry has nothing to show.

What’s next

• Collection filters: the Filters screen, and the sidebar this shares its engine with
• Search results section: the page advanced search hands off to
• Advanced Search section reference: the section’s settings
• Working with Sections: pages and templates

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