RE: DIH nested entities don't work

[mroosendaal <mr...@yahoo.com>]

Hi James,

Just to let you know, i've just completed the PoC and it worked great!
Thanks.

What i still find difficult to is how to implement a 'guided' navigation
with Solr. That is one of the strenghts of Endeca and with Solr you have to
create this yourself. What are your thoughts on that and what challenges did
you encounter when moving to Endeca?

Thanks,
Maarten



--
View this message in context: http://lucene.472066.n3.nabble.com/DIH-nested-entities-don-t-work-tp4015514p4024467.html
Sent from the Solr - User mailing list archive at Nabble.com.

RE: DIH nested entities don't work

["Dyer, James" <Ja...@ingramcontent.com>]

Maarten,

Glad to hear that your DIH experiment worked well for you.  

To implement something like Endeca's guided navigation, see http://wiki.apache.org/solr/SolrFacetingOverview .  If you need to implement multi-level faceting, see http://wiki.apache.org/solr/HierarchicalFaceting  (but caution:  some of the techniques here are for non-committed feature patches).

If you're trying to do anything but the most simple cases, I would recommend getting yourself a good book that walks you through it, such as Smiley&Pugh's Solr Book.  There is also a lot to read on the topic from mail lists archives, blog posts, etc.  

The hardest thing for us in going from Endeca was that Solr doesn't have the "N-Value" concept.  So if you want to drill down on, say "Department", you might do something like this:  facet=true&facet.field=DEPARTMENT , whereas Endeca would generate some esoteric N-value in an obscure Xml file so you would end up with a query like N=4567897865 .  Unfortunately for us, we had those N-values hardcoded all over our application and we ended up having to create a cross-reference table so that we didn't have to rewrite a ton of code at once.  

Overall, Solr's faceting is a lot more flexible that what Endeca has to offer.  And its a lot simpler to set up and understand.  However, Endeca's strong point here is that an admin could configure a lot of behaviors on the back end and then developers could just write to the API and it would do everything for them.  (Of course, this also encourages you to write your app so that its harder to convert to anything else.)  We were able to convert from Endeca with Solr 1.4, including 2- & 3- level Dimensions, using facet.prefix.  The new features in Solr3 & especially Solr4 should make it easier and more efficient though.

If you have more questions about faceting, I would start a new discussion thread about it.  There are a lot of approaches to solving various problems so you may get a variety of answers.

James Dyer
E-Commerce Systems
Ingram Content Group
(615) 213-4311


-----Original Message-----
From: mroosendaal [mailto:mroosendaal@yahoo.com] 
Sent: Wednesday, December 05, 2012 8:23 AM
To: solr-user@lucene.apache.org
Subject: RE: DIH nested entities don't work

Hi James,

Just to let you know, i've just completed the PoC and it worked great!
Thanks.

What i still find difficult to is how to implement a 'guided' navigation
with Solr. That is one of the strenghts of Endeca and with Solr you have to
create this yourself. What are your thoughts on that and what challenges did
you encounter when moving to Endeca?

Thanks,
Maarten



--
View this message in context: http://lucene.472066.n3.nabble.com/DIH-nested-entities-don-t-work-tp4015514p4024467.html
Sent from the Solr - User mailing list archive at Nabble.com.