Customizing Facets and Drill Down Navigation

Facets were introduced in eZ Find 2.0 to enable you to create browse-based search functionality. In other words, the search results can be further narrowed after the original search has been made. This is sometimes called “drilling down” into the results. Facets refer to the characteristics of the content objects in the results, such as their class, author, and translation. The default templates provide some simple facet examples, although eZ Find is capable of providing much more functionality.

In order to use facets you must customize the search templates. To make this easier, the template operators facetParameters and filterParameters have been added, which provide default parameters to implement facet functionality. Facet-related parameters are described in more detailed in the next section about the eZ Find fetch function.

Range Facets

Audience

This feature is for (template) developers building advanced search and navigation interfaces.

Goals and Use Cases

Range facets are a general type of facets, like date facets. They should be used to stitch together what otherwise could also be obtained with discrete query facets operating on numeric and date types.

Important: Range facets should also be used for date facets as the latter one is deprecated also in Solr!

How to Use

There can be multiple range facets specified, just like the field facets (but unlike the date facets in previous releases, where only one date facet could be called per fetch query).

Example of template code:

fetch( ezfind, search, hash( 'query', '$queryString, facet',array( hash( 'range', hash('field', 'published', 'start', 'NOW/YEAR-3YEARS', 'end', 'NOW/YEAR+1YEAR', 'gap', '+1YEAR' ) ) ) ) )

The parameters accepted as a hash array for the 'range' facet type are:

Name	Required	Value/Description
field	yes	The field name to use (meta data or attribute).
start	yes	Range start: any value valid for the numeric/data type.
end	yes	Range end: any value valid for the numeric/data type.
hardend	no	Strig 'true' or 'false' (default) instructing Solr what to do if the intervals do not divide nicely between start and end. If 'true', the 'end' parameter will be enforced. Otherwise, the gap will be used to determine the real end value.
other	no	String. Will be used to tell the back end to provide more, less, all or no counts other than the ones in specified range: before: all records with field values lower than the lower bound value of the first range after: all records with field values greater than the upper bound value of the last range between: all records with field values between the start and the end bound values of all ranges none: no records will be computed all: means all counts (shortcut to 'before', 'between' and 'after')
include	no	By default, the ranges used to compute range faceting between range start and range end. The lower bounds are inclusive and the upper bounds are exclusive (i.e.: the 'before' range is exclusive and the 'after' range is inclusive). This is the default behaviour, equivalent to 'lower' (see description below), and will not result in double counting at the boundaries. This behaviour can be modified by the facet range.include parameter, which can be any combination of the following options: 'lower': all gap based ranges include their lower bound 'upper': all gap based ranges include their upper bound 'edge': the first and last gap ranges include their edge bounds (i.e.: lower for the first one, upper for the last one), even if the corresponding upper/lower option is not specified 'outer': the "before" and "after" ranges will include their bounds, even if the first or last ranges already include those boundaries 'all': shorthand for lower, upper, edge, outer

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Table of contents

Customizing Facets and Drill Down Navigation

Range Facets

Audience

Goals and Use Cases

How to Use

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