: to make it clear, i agree that it doesn't make sense faceting on all : available fields, I only want faceting on those 300 attributes that are : stored together with the fields for full text searches. A : product/document has typically only 5-10 attributes. : : I like to decide at index time which attributes of a product might be of : interest for faceting and store those in dynamic fields with the : attribute-name and some kind of prefix or suffix to identify them at : query time as facet.fields. Exactly the naming convention you mentioned.
but if the facet fields are different for every document, and they use a simple dynamicField prefix (like "facet_*" for example) how do you know at query time which fields to facet on? ... even if wildcards work in facet.field, usingfacet.field=facet_* would require solr to compute the counts for *every* field matching that pattern to find out which ones have positive counts for the current result set -- there may only be 5 that actually matter, but it's got to try all 300 of them to find out which 5 that is. this is where custom request handlers that understand that faceting "metadata" for your documents becomes key ... so you can say "when querying across the entire collection, only try to facet on category and manufacturer. if the search is constrained by category, then lookup other facet options to offer based on that category name from our metadata store, etc... -Hoss
