I'm certainly not smart enough to look under the hood of SOLR, but from
the one basic installation I've been messing with, it seems like the
faceting is for non-hierarchical data only. I could be wrong, though. In
my mind categories and facets are similar but distinct, like the
category dictates the type of facets. What if sex, purpose, and
waterproofness were facets and shoes were the category? Then you could
have SOLR pull the Male/Femal for sex, Hiking/Running/Etc for type, and
Yes/No for waterproof and build your nvaigation that way?
Corey
Matthew Runo wrote:
We were thinking of using SOLR simply because we'll end up navigating
around the products via facets at some level - so why not just use it
from the beginning.
For example, if we build the category landing pages from our DB, when
the user clicks on a link, they'll get dumped into SOLR to view the
products.. why not get the list of available categories to generate
the landing page as well? Either way, we have to store the departments
in the index, right?
Am I trying to make SOLR do something it's not designed to do? Please
tell me if I am =p
+--------------------------------------------------------+
| Matthew Runo
| Zappos Development
| [EMAIL PROTECTED]
| 702-943-7833
+--------------------------------------------------------+
On Jul 16, 2007, at 12:13 PM, Corey Tisdale wrote:
So you want your category display to be controlled by SOLR? Why not
keep the hierarchical structure of categories in a RDBMS, then keep
the product index in SOLR?
Corey
On Jul 16, 2007, at 1:56 PM, Matthew Runo wrote:
Hello!
I was very surprised to find that this wasn't in the email archive
for this list.... I'm wondering about the best way to provide
hierarchal navigation using facets. For example, lets assume that I
have products with department trees like:
Footwear > Mens > Hiking > Waterproof (could be arbitrarily deep
though..)
Now, I need to make a "Mens Footwear" landing page. So ok, I'll
facet on "department", for a search of "mens+footwear" present in
"department".
Oops.. now I'm showing lots and lots and lots of departments,
because I don't know which ones are "higher level" than others.
Since each department has many departments under it, a full list
would be so long that people wouldn't use it. Information overload.
Ok, so I'll break up the "department" field, and put it into
"top_level_department" and "mid_level_department" and the rest of
the items just in "department". The landing page will facet
"top_level_department", and upon rendering the page I'll query SOLR
to get all the "mid_level_department" facets for that
top_level_department. Then, if the user clicks on one of these,
we'll facet on "department" to get the rest of them (and the
products) with the other two levels as filter queries.
That would work (right?), but it seems horribly wasteful to run all
those extra queries to get the sub-department facets. Surely there
is a better way here.. just waiting to be brought to light.
How have you implemented hierarchal navigation via SOLR?
+--------------------------------------------------------+
| Matthew Runo
| Zappos Development
| [EMAIL PROTECTED]
| 702-943-7833
+--------------------------------------------------------+
