Hybris: Use same field for search and facet

Question

I have to use a field "manufacturerName" for both solr search and solr facet in Hybris. While the solr free text search requires the field type to be text, the facet only works properly in string type.

Is there any way to use this same field for both search and facet. I think there is one way by using "copyField" but I searched a lot, and still don't know how to use it?

Any help would be highly appreciated!

PS: On keeping the field type string, free text search doesn't fetch proper results. On keeping the field type text, facet shows truncated values.

Answer 1

Using a copyField instruction is the way to go, but that require you to define an alternative field - meaning you have one field with the type text and the associated tokenization, and one field of the type string which isn't processed in any way. There is no way in Solr to combine these in a single field that I know of.

You'll then use the name of the string field to generate the facets, while you use the other field when you're querying.

<copyField source="text_search_field" dest="string_facet_field" />

You'll then have to refer to the name string_facet_field when you're filtering or faceting on the field. You'll want to filter against the facet field after the user selects a facet, since you otherwise would end up with documents from other facets possibly leaking into your document result set (for example if the facet was "Foo Bar", you'd suddenly get documents that had "Baz Foo Bar Spam" as the facet, since both words are present in the search string.

Answer 2

I was not able to implement the "copyField" approach, but I found another easy way to do this. In solr.impex, I had already added my new field manufacturerNameFacet of type string, but there is a parameter "fieldValueProvider" and "valueProviderParameter". I provided these values as "springELValueProvider" and the field I wanted to use for search and facet "manufacturerName". After a solr full indexing, it worked like a charm. No other setting was required. The search and facet both were working as expected.