: layer on top of that though, right? Lets say someone says 'Oh yeah, I : mean thriller' then you want to show author. You don't want to list : 5000 author names right off the bat -- you want to let them pick a : letter like 'author last name starts with a', then display author
At a certian point, logic like that really becomes domain specific: you have to know in advance that the author field is soemthng that you want to have two levels of filtering (first by intial, then by full name) meanwhile the category field should have the full list of facets displayed, and the price field should have facets displayed based on ranges -- but hwat should the ranges be? In my experience, there's really two types of faceting: data driven (pick/display facets based entirely on the terms found in the index) and metadata driven (pick the facets based on configuration supplied by an index maintainer who kows about hte nature of the data) data driven faceting is something i think the standard request handler cna support really easily just by having a parameter that lets you specify a list of fields to display faceted counts for relative hte current search. simple metadata driven faceting can be done using the second approach described in the todo: letting the query client supply a list of facet queries as part of the request -- but that really doesn't seem like it can scale up to the level of thousands of authors whose names start with "a" That's the point where writing a custom query handler that knows about hte rules you want to use to drive your facets really makes sense. : letter step and just show the author names. What if the todo went : something like I'll be honest, i'm not really following whatyou mean here, but feel free to elaborate and add your ideas to the wiki ... i would suggest making a new "ComplexFacetingBrainstorming" wiki page with your ideas and link to it from the Todo page. -Hoss
