Faceted Search and Customized Search Filtering

Faceted search is a search mechanism that allows search results to be narrowed down by applying a set of filters to the result of a search query. Liferay’s Search portlet supports faceted search. Its default configuration contains several facets including Site, Asset Type, Tag, Category, Folder, User, and Modified Date. When you use Liferay’s Search portlet to perform a search, a result set is displayed. You can refine your search by clicking on one or more facets to apply a search filter. For example, the Search portlet displays results from any site, by default. In the Search portlet, you can click on the name of a specific site to filter the search to display only results from the selected site. In addition to using faceted search in the Search portlet, Liferay transparently uses faceted search in other places throughout the portal.

In this tutorial, you’ll learn how to create custom facets and configure them in Liferay’s Search portlet. You’ll also learn how to use Liferay’s search API to create custom search filters that aren’t suited to being implemented as facets. Before proceeding, make sure you’re familiar with the following terminology:

  • A facet is a combination of information about a specific indexed field: its terms and their frequencies. Facets are typically named after the field in question.

  • The number of times a given term appears within a set of documents is called the term’s frequency.

  • A list of terms and their frequencies for a specific field is called a term result list. In other words, a term result list is a list of information about a specific facet.

  • Some facets have a property called frequency threshold. This value indicates the minimum frequency required for terms to appear in the term result list. For example, if the frequency threshold of a facet is set to 3, a term appearing only twice won’t appear in the term result list.

  • Some facets have a property called max terms. This value indicates the maximum number of terms that are included in the term result list regardless of how many actual matching terms are found for the facet. Using a max terms property can keep the number of search results under control so that users are not overwhelmed by too much information.

  • The order property determines the default ordering used for the term result list. There are two possible modes: Order Hits Descending, or Order Value Ascending. The first, Order Hits Descending, means that results will be ordered by frequency in a descending order. The second, Order Value Ascending, means that the results will be ordered by value (i.e., by term) in ascending order. Both modes fall back to the other mode as a secondary sort order when there are duplicates. This means that many terms with the same frequency are always sorted by value.

  • A range defines an interval within which all the matching terms’ frequencies are summed. This means that if a facet defines a term range for the createDate field between the years 2008 to 2010, and another for 2012 to 2014, all matching documents having a creation time within one of these specified ranges are returned as a sum for that range. Thus you may find seven documents in the first range and 18 documents in the second range. Ranges cannot be used with multi-value fields.

Configuring Custom Facets

There are two ways to configure custom facets for search in Liferay:

  1. Configure custom facets in Liferay’s Search portlet JSON configuration.

  2. Use Liferay’s search API to programmatically create facets and add them to a search context.

Setting up facet configurations using a JSON definition is the most flexible solution since the configuration can be dynamically changed at runtime. However, this option is only available in Liferay’s Search portlet. Programmatically adding facets to a search context allows developers to tightly control how the search is used. This option is available to developers of custom Liferay portlets.

Suppose you need to provide a means for users to search only for images in Liferay. You can easily configure custom facets in Liferay’s Search portlet to achieve this. To configure the Search portlet to search only for images, open the Search portlet’s Configuration window. Add the following two facets to its JSON configuration:

{
        "displayStyle": "asset_entries",
        "static": true,
        "weight": 1.5,
        "order": "OrderHitsDesc",
        "data": {
                "values": [
                        "com.liferay.portlet.documentlibrary.model.DLFileEntry"
                ],
                "frequencyThreshold": 0
        },
        "className": "com.liferay.portal.kernel.search.facet.AssetEntriesFacet",
        "label": "asset-type",
        "fieldName": "entryClassName"
},
{
        "displayStyle": "asset_entries",
        "static": true,
        "weight": 1.5,
        "order": "OrderHitsDesc",
        "data": {
                "values": [
                        "bmp", "gif", "jpeg", "jpg", "odg", "png", "svg"
                ],
                "frequencyThreshold": 0
        },
        "className": "com.liferay.portal.kernel.search.facet.MultiValueFacet",
        "label": "images",
        "fieldName": "extension"
}

To learn how to configure Liferay’s Search portlet, including an explanation of this example, please refer to the Search portlet documentation.

Faceted search in Liferay is not restricted to Liferay’s Search portlet. If you’re implementing a search feature for a custom Liferay portlet, you can still implement faceted search by programmatically creating facets and adding them to a search context. Liferay provides several facet implementation classes that developers can instantiate and use for custom portlet development. These facet implementation classes belong to Liferay’s com.liferay.portal.kernel.search.facet package. They include these:

  • SimpleFacet
  • MultiValueFacet
    • AssetEntriesFacet
    • ScopeFacet
  • RangeFacet
    • ModifiedFacet

SimpleFacet, MultiValueFacet, and RangeFacet extend BaseFacet. BaseFacet is an abstract class that implements the Facet interface. SimpleFacet, MultiValueFacet, and RangeFacet are facet implementation classes that can be re-used with any indexed fields. You should use SimpleFacet when you’re interested in filtering on a single-valued field and MultiValueFacet when you’re interested in filtering a multi-valued field. Use RangeFacet when you’re interested in filtering by specifying a range of values for a field. AssetEntriesFacet and ScopeFacet extend MultiValueFacet and operate on specific indexed fields. AssetEntriesFacet operates on the entryClassName field and ScopeFacet operates on the groupId (or scopeGroupId) field. ModifiedFacet extends RangeFacet and operates on another specific indexed field: modifiedDate.

Suppose, for example, that you’re developing a custom search portlet that should only search for a specific types of assets in specific sites. The following example shows how you can configure your search context to achieve this:

Facet assetEntriesFacet = new AssetEntriesFacet(searchContext);
assetEntriesFacet.setStatic(true);            
searchContext.addFacet(assetEntriesFacet);

String[] entryClassNames = { oneCustomEntity.class.getName(), anotherCustomEntity.class.getName() }; // Replace this value
searchContext.setEntryClassNames(entryClassNames);

Facet scopeFacet = new ScopeFacet(searchContext);
scopeFacet.setStatic(true);            
searchContext.addFacet(scopeFacet);

long[] groupIds = { oneGroupId, anotherGroupId } // Replace this value
searchContext.setGroupIds(groupIds);

Remember that AssetEntriesFacet only operates on the entryClassName field and ScopeFacet only operates on the groupId (or scopeGroupId field). Also, recall from the Search portlet documentation that static facets are not rendered in the UI. Static facets use pre-set values rather than inputs dynamically applied by users. When programmatically configuring facets that aren’t configurable by users, you should declare the facets to be static. Since users can’t configure static facets, you need to specify the types of assets and group IDs that should be searched. To do this, you populate the entryClassNames and groupIds arrays and add them to the search context via searchContext.setEntryClassNames(...) and searchContext.setGroupIds(...) method calls. Any indexed document whose asset type name does not belong to the entryClassName array is filtered out of the search results. Likewise, any indexed document whose groupId does not belong to the groupIds array is filtered out of the search results.

Customized Search Filtering

Sometimes, you might be required to implement very specific kinds of search filters. For example, suppose you need to search both web content articles and only PDF files from the Documents and Media library. This kind of requirement is not suited to a facet implementation. Since facets are metrics that are calculated across an entire result set, using facets’ ability to drill down as a means of filtering may lead to poor performance and overly complex facet configurations. Drilling down means manually applying filters to a search.

Figure 1: Here, the user has drilled down (filtered the search results) by manually selecting the Liferay site and the Document asset type.

Figure 1: Here, the user has *drilled down* (filtered the search results) by manually selecting the *Liferay* site and the *Document* asset type.

If you need specific filters that are not suited to being implemented as facets, you can still use Liferay’s search API. Instead of adding facets to a search context, you can set boolean clauses on the search context. That is, instead of using searchContext.addFacet(Facet facet), you would use searchContext.setBooleanClauses(BooleanClause[] booleanClauses). This strategy allows you to pass any number of filter criteria to the search context as an array of boolean clauses. Filtering implemented this way is several times more efficient than anything done via the facet API. Another advantage of the boolean clause API is that it supports features like exclusions (e.g., (-field:not_this_value)) which are not supported by facets.

Consider again the case where you need to search both web content articles and only PDF files from the Documents and Media library. You could develop a custom search portlet to satisfy this use case but it’s easier to customize the Search portlet. The following steps explain how to create a JSP hook to customize the Search portlet to satisfy this use case.

  1. Create a new Liferay hook project. To create a new Liferay hook project using Liferay IDE, select FileNew Liferay Plugin Project, select the Hook plugin type, then click Finish.

  2. If you’re using Liferay IDE, right-click on your project in the Package Explorer and select New Liferay Hook Configuration. Check the Custom JSPs box and click Next. Leave the Custom JSP folder set to /custom_jsps and click Add from Liferay… next to JSP files to override. Select html/portlet/search/init.jsp and html/portlet/search/main_search.jsp, then click Finish.

    If you’re not using Liferay IDE, create a liferay-hook.xml file in your project’s docroot/WEB-INF folder and add the following contents to it:

     <?xml version="1.0"?>
     <!DOCTYPE hook PUBLIC "-//Liferay//DTD Hook 6.2.0//EN" "http://www.liferay.com/dtd/liferay-hook_6_2_0.dtd">
    
     <hook>
             <custom-jsp-dir>/custom_jsps</custom-jsp-dir>
     </hook>
    

    Then create a html/portlet/search/custom_jsps directory in your project’s docroot folder and copy the portal-web/docroot/html/portlet/search/init.jsp and portal-web/docroot/html/portlet/search/main_search.jsp html/portlet/search/main_search.jsp files into this folder from Liferay’s source code.

  3. Edit your docroot/custom_jsps/html/portlet/search/main_search.jsp file and find the following line:

     searchContext.setStart(mainSearchSearchContainer.getStart());
    

    Add the following lines just below the line above:

     Query stringQuery = StringQueryFactoryUtil.create("entryClassName:com.liferay.portlet.journal.model.JournalArticle (+entryClassName:com.liferay.portlet.documentlibrary.model.DLFileEntry +extension:pdf)");
    
     BooleanClause clause = BooleanClauseFactoryUtil.create(searchContext, stringQuery, BooleanClauseOccur.MUST.getName());
    
     searchContext.setBooleanClauses(new BooleanClause[] {clause});
    

    In the query that you construct above, you’re specifying that you’re searching for indexed documents with either an entryClassName equal to JournalArticle or both an entryClassName equal to DLFileEntry and an extension equal to pdf. For more information on Lucene query syntax, please refer to Lucene’s documentation.

  4. Then edit your docroot/custom_jsps/html/portlet/search/init.jsp file to add the required imports.

    Find the following line:

     <%@ page import="java.util.LinkedList" %>
    

    Add the following lines just below the line above:

     <%@ page import="com.liferay.portal.kernel.search.SearchContext" %>
     <%@ page import="com.liferay.portal.kernel.search.BooleanClause" %>
     <%@ page import="com.liferay.portal.kernel.search.BooleanClauseFactoryUtil" %>
     <%@ page import="com.liferay.portal.kernel.search.BooleanClauseOccur" %>
     <%@ page import="com.liferay.portal.kernel.search.StringQueryFactoryUtil" %>
     <%@ page import="com.liferay.portal.kernel.search.Query" %>
    

When you’re finished following the above steps, deploy your hook plugin and test the Search portlet. Check that it only returns web content articles or documents and media files with the .pdf file extension as search results. Note: If you only want your Search portlet customizations to apply to a single site, use an application adapter hook. See the Application Adapters tutorial for details.

Enabling Search and Indexing

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