The Nexus 1.7.2 release offers an improved search interface making it even easier to locate the libraries and artifacts you need in Nexus. Sonatype has published a version of Nexus 1.7.2 on http://repository.sonatype.org which contains some dramatic improvements to the search interface. Download the new Nexus Open Source or Nexus Professional release and start searching for artifacts.
What is new in the Nexus 1.7.2 search interface?
- Search results now link directly to the latest version of a matching artifact.
- Selecting a search result immediately displays information about the matching artifact. You can browse artifact information from the search interface.
- (Nexus Professional) Archive browsing and artifact metadata are available from the search interface.
- Matching artifacts of different types (pom, jar, war, zip, etc.) can be downloaded from the search results page.
This release takes the effort out of searching for artifacts in Nexus. Here are some sceenshots of the new interface now available on http://repository.sonatype.org and soon to be available in the 1.7.2 release of Nexus Open Source and Nexus Professional.
If you are searching for artifacts in Nexus, start with either the Advanced Search interface or the Welcome panel shown below. This Welcome panel is the first thing you will see when you load Nexus in the browser, to see the welcome screen go to http://repository.sonatype.org.
To search for an artifact, just type in a keyword. A keyword can be a groupId, an artifactId, or just the name of a project. If you were searching for the latest version of the Guice library, you would type in "guice" in the Welcome panel and either press Return or click on the search icon to the right of the search box. Searching for Guice will show the following result panel.
What's new in this interface?
- Look at the Version column in the search results. In this version of the search interface, we decided to list the most recent version. If you need to view a different version, click on "Show All Versions". Clicking on "Show All Versions" will drill down into the list of available versions.
- Look at the Download column in the search results. This Download column contains direct download links for the most recent version of the artifact. To download a matching artifact, just click on a link in this column.
- Select a search result, and you will see the artifact in the Repository Tree in the lower left-hand quadrant of this interface. This is helpful to give you context for an artifact. An artifact could be present in more than one repository. If this is the case, click on the value next to "Viewing Repository" to switch between multiple matching repositories.
- In the lower right-hand quadrant of the interface, you will see a number of tabs which show information about the selected search result:
- Maven Information: This contains basic identifiers and a snippet of XML you can use to add this artifact as a project dependency.
- Archive Browser (Nexus Professional): This gives you a way to explore the contents of an archive in the repository. You can view the files and folders contained in a matching search result.
- Artifact Information: This tab contains timestamps, file size, checksum values, and a list of repositories containing a given artifact.
- Artifact Metadata (Nexus Professional): This tab shows all of the built-in and custom metadata associated with an artifact.
This new search interface will be a part of the Nexus 1.7.2 search interface available in both Nexus Open Source and Nexus Professional.
