Universal Search vs VertiGIS Studio Search vs multi environment deployment

Hi,

Apologies for the length of this post, just wanting to provide some context.

We have an issue with VertiGIS Studio Search and our specific deployment that I'm hoping for advise on.

We have VertiGIS Suite installed on our Dev, UAT and PRD Portals and had originally configured our searches as VertiGIS Studio Search type. We then stumbled upon this article which states:

“When deploying a VertiGIS Studio Web app that is integrated with VertiGIS Studio Search, the original VertiGIS Studio Search configuration will be used by the deployed app(s) to prevent excessive copies of indexed data from being created. In some cases, like if each deployment stage has a separate environment or if it's critical that changes to the search configuration in development do not affect the later stage(s), it may be more desirable to have separate versions of the index. You can do this by creating a Universal search configuration for each deployed environment, as outlined below.”

We took this to mean the VertiGIS Studio Search type search item will not be copied when we deploy from Dev to UAT (and then to PRD) and that the UAT and PRD VertiGIS Studio Web search tool will point back to the Dev item created by the VertiGIS Studio Search type search. This wont work for us as we don't keep out data in Dev up to date, and various other reasons.

The article indicates we should use Universal Search instead, so I tested it out and could get it working. However, I could not figure out how to wire it up to the search tool component. We will need the standard search tool as some layers are configured to be searchable using the Standard Esri Search. The pdf instructions that come with the Universal Search workflow only explain how to connect the workflow via the I Want to component. 

We have run this by our regional vendor - they were very helpful but didn't think there was a way to resolve this issue aside from having two search bars. I'm hoping some of you out there may have either wired up the Universal Search workflow to the search tool or have some alternative ideas I haven't considered?

Much thanks if you got this far!

Amber