Checkbox facets and enhanced faceted navigation

Developers Search Interface
1

Hi,

I’m attempting to implement checkbox facets as per GitHub - funnelback/faceted-navigation: Replacement macros for faceted navigation display. Adds support for checkbox facets and faceted navigation category sort and rename. it is mostly working ok.

When I do a search a list, the available facets are appropriate for the results, but when selecting a facet to refine the results futher the list of facets don’t change, this means that it is possible to select anther facet that will return no results, which seems undesirable.

Is this expected behavior? or am I missing something.

I’m using

<@fbf.FacetedSearch>
<@fbf.Facet>
    <ul>
        <@fbf.Category tag="">
             <li><a href="${fbf.categoryLinkAddress}"><#if fbf.checked><span class="glyphicon glyphicon-check"></span><#else><span class="glyphicon glyphicon-unchecked"></span></#if>${fbf.categoryValue.label}</a></li>
        </@fbf.Category>
    </ul>
</@fbf.Facet>
</@fbf.FacetedSearch>

Georgina.

2

Hi Georgina,

Checkbox facets as implemented in the GitHub code have a few limitations and unfortunately combinations that result in zero results is one of them so yes this is expected and is a side effect for how the facets are produced. This isn’t the case with the standard single select facets.

The other limitations when using checkbox facets include:

  • You don’t get counts for the categories
  • You don’t have the ability to have sub-categories/facets
  • The categories are always ORed within a facet and ANDed across facets.
  • You shouldn’t use checkbox facets with gscope type categories.

regards,
Peter

3

We can live with all the limitations:

  • no counts
  • we don’t have sub-categories/facets
  • the logic to ORed within a facet and ANDed across facets - seems logical
  • We have organised ourselves out of gscope type.

However the zero result combination does seem like a serious limitation. Is this likely to be changed in the future?

The example aleks posted over at Changing Funnelback facets form control type - #4 by gavin1211 does a really nice job, with good behaviour.

4

Unfortunately it’s not possible with how the checkbox facets work - the available categories are based on what categories are returned for the query when no facet constraints are applied.

If you’re limited to a single facet it’s not a problem, but there’s no real way of accounting for all the different combinations with other facets that can occur when the conditions are ANDed together.

5

@georgina Yes in the next release both ANDed and ORed multi select facets are supported out of the box, including support for counts. You could not display a link for values with zero result counts, or not display the value at all.

6

@LukeButters - in the next release, will the facet constraint(s) applied in one facet also be applied in other multi-select facets?

7

Do you mean “in another multi-select values”, ie are the values available in the multi select facet, ones that are available with other facet constraints are applied. Currently no, that is why you would have to filter out values with a count of zero client side.

Perhaps it would make sense to have an option to do this server side.

8

That’s great news, when is the next release scheduled?

9

Hi, I will find out (the project manager is on leave), I think it will be more than a month away.

Is the website that you are implementing checkbox facets on public? If so can I crawl it? I would like to try out checkbox facets on more real world data.

10

Hi @georgina,

The tentative release dates for Funnelback 15.12 is late October or early November. We’ll release more information once we firm up the release.

Thanks,

~Gioan

11

Thanks Gioan,

We will attempt to schedule in an upgrade late November :slight_smile:.

12

Hi Georgina

15.12 has been released hopefully it supports your use case.

-Luke.