This is an interesting question. Having worked at 2 of the major enterprise search software vendors for the last 6 years I can say that most all other engines out there do in fact handle this by default however they do it at the expense of having to define all the fields you want facets on before building the index. Then if you want to add a field later for faceting, guess what, you get to reindex all of your content.
Solr's model however seems to be much nicer in that you can define on the fly what facets you want on a query by query basis and even allow 'users' to define their own facets. (if you were crazy or have a suitably small index) of course) If all you want is some nice shorthand to turn on a pre-configured set of facets you can set default on the standard / dismax request handlers or write your own. - will -----Original Message----- From: Paul Battley [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Tuesday, April 24, 2007 10:34 AM To: solr-user@lucene.apache.org Subject: Automatically enumerating facets: is it possible? I'm using Solr's facet-searching features to drill down into a selection of documents, and I want to find the available sub-facets at each stage, as explained on the wiki. For example, if I have facets fields x and y, I can pass the following parameters to enumerate the possible values for those fields: facet=true&facet.field=x&facet.field=y I then get something like (XML noise removed): x foo: 17 bar: 6 y baz: 3 quux: 2 However, what I really want is for Solr to work this out automatically, obviating the requirement to pass in x and y in the query. I can't find any mention of the capability to do this, and yet it seems like something that Solr might be able to do. Can it be done? Paul.
