Here's one approach that should work: You could treat departments the way the sample app treats manufacturers, with a manu field (tokenized) and a manu_exact field (nontokenized). You would then do your initial search (mens+footwear) on the dept field, and facet on the dept_exact field, with facet.sort=false. This will give you an alphabetical list of relevant departments, which your application can group in whatever way you need (show top-level departments with sub-departments in javascript-activated dropdowns, whatever).
If a user clicks on a department or subdepartment to narrow their search, you do a filter query on the dept_exact field, and use a prefix query to limit the facets in the result page if you want (e.g. fq=dept_exact:Footwear>Mens*&facet.prefix=Footwear>Mens). If you've got too many potential dept_exact values, I suppose you could bite off the top couple of levels into a dept_top_exact field and facet on that until the user drills down far enough that you need to go to dept_exact. The dept field would contain the full department string, so they'd still find the dept_top_exact values that pertain to mens' footwear even if the "Mens > Footwear" elements were deep in the department hierarchy. And of course populating these multiple fields can be handled automatically in the schema using copyField elements. Peter Peter Binkley Digital Initiatives Technology Librarian Information Technology Services 4-30 Cameron Library University of Alberta Libraries Edmonton, Alberta Canada T6G 2J8 Phone: (780) 492-3743 Fax: (780) 492-9243 e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] ~ The code is willing, but the data is weak. ~ -----Original Message----- From: Matthew Runo [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Monday, July 16, 2007 1:26 PM To: solr-user@lucene.apache.org Subject: Re: Faceted Hierarchal Navigation 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 >> +--------------------------------------------------------+ >> >> >
