Hi Tim! Sorry for the delay, I was on vacation for a few days.
To set the repeater data to empty, in the onReady function you can do this:
$w ( “#myRepeaterID” ). data = ;
There are some tutorials on populating a repeater from data that may point you in the right direction for your own dataset. Please take a look at these:
Forum tutorial example
youTube tutorial for filtering by dropdown (not a search bar, but conceptually similar)
And finally, this is likely the API reference you are looking for. WixData Query. You can query your collection and it will return results to you