Sitecore Azure Search suggestions

TL;DR https://github.com/moo2u2/Sitecore-Azure-Search-Suggestions

One of the more common requests I hear (and quite obvious gap in my opinion) is the support for suggestions when using Azure Search.  Auto-suggestions are supported when using Solr as of 9.0.1 (and SXA supports this in the Search Box rendering parameters) and Azure has both Suggestions and Autocomplete APIs.

I recently had the opportunity to take a crack at this missing feature, which I based off the SXA implementation.

Code is in my GitHub Sitecore-AzureSearch-Suggestions repo.
There are 3 branches:

• The master branch contains the simplest implementation, however uses Azure Search binaries from NuGet, and has a dependency on SXA.
• The no-azure-client branch does not use the Azure Search binaries but makes API calls directly like the rest of the Sitecore Azure Search implementation
• The no-sxa branch contains the implementation with Azure binaries, but no SXA dependency

There is also an Autocomplete implementation in there (partial in some branches).  For a quick overview of the difference see this MS blog post.

Unfortunately the Sitecore Azure Search dlls (Sitecore.ContentSearch.Azure.*) do not seem to be as extensible as the rest of sitecore, as there are numerous internal classes and private methods/properties.

The following classes had to pretty much be copied out as they couldn't be extended :(

• Sitecore.ContentSearch.Azure.Http.SearchService
• Sitecore.ContentSearch.Azure.Http.SearchServiceClient properties + GetClient method
• Sitecore.ContentSearch.Azure.Http.CompositeSearchService
• Sitecore.ContentSearch.Azure.CloudSearchProviderIndex ConnectionStringName,
• SearchCloudIndexName properties
• Sitecore.ContentSearch.Azure.CloudSearchProviderIndexName
• Sitecore.ContentSearch.Azure.ISwitchSearchIndexInitializable
• Sitecore.ContentSearch.Azure.Schema.CloudSearchIndexSchema
• Sitecore.ContentSearch.Azure.Http.MultiStatusResponseDocument
• All Sitecore.ContentSearch.Azure.Http.Exceptions exceptions
• Sitecore.ContentSearch.Azure.Exception.CloudSearchCompositeSearchServiceException
• Sitecore.ContentSearch.Azure.Exception.CloudSearchMissingImplementationException

Hopefully the product team can fix this up for a later version!

Oh and I found a couple of typos while I was in there ;)

• Sitecore.ContentSearch.Azure.Utils.Retryer.IRertyPolicy
• /sitecore/media library/Base Themes/SearchTheme/Scripts/component-search-box
  return '<div class="sugesstion-item">' + suggestionText + '</div>';