Custom Facet

All Facets are configurable, allowing you to narrow down search results based on a shared characteristic (all Blog Entries, for example). The Custom Facet lets you create entirely new Facets. The first thing to do is enter the Custom Facet’s configuration screen.

Figure 1: Custom Facets must be configured first.

The screenshot above shows a Custom Facet with the Job Title of each User that matched the search. The next screenshot shows how it was configured.

Figure 2: Configure a Custom Facet in no time.

Aggregation Field

Specify the non-analyzed keyword field whose value is used to create the facet terms. If the value of the search result’s jobTitle_sortable field is upsale manager, that’s what appears in the Custom Facet as a term.

Custom Heading

Enter a human readable heading for the Custom Facet.

Custom Parameter Name

Set the URL parameter to use for the facet. With the configuration pictured above, searching for jane and clicking on chief of security produces the URL

http://localhost:8080/web/guest/search?q=jane&jobtitle=chief%20of%20security

Max Terms

Set the maximum number of facet terms to display, regardless of how many matching terms are found for the facet.

Frequency Threshold

Set the minimum frequency required for terms to appear in the result list. For example, if the frequency threshold of a facet is set to 3, a term with two matching results doesn’t appear in the term result list.

Display Frequencies

Choose whether to display the term frequencies.

Finding Indexed Fields

To use the Custom Facet, you must know which non-analyzed keyword field to specify.

To browse the entire list of available fields, inspect the field mappings from Control Panel → Configuration → Search. Alternatively, use your search engine’s API.

For Elasticsearch, access the field mappings from your terminal using CURL to call the Get Mapping API:

curl -X GET "localhost:9200/_mapping/LiferayDocumentType"?pretty

Solr uses the ListFields API:

curl http://localhost:8983/solr/liferay/schema/

Here’s a snippet of output from the Elasticsearch example:

"ddmStructureKey": {
    "store": true,
    "type": "keyword"
},
"ddmTemplateKey": {
    "store": true,
    "type": "keyword"
},
"defaultLanguageId": {
    "store": true,
    "type": "keyword"
},
"description": {
    "store": true,
    "term_vector": "with_positions_offsets",
    "type": "text"
},
"discussion": {
    "store": true,
    "type": "keyword"
},

Use Custom Fields to aggregate facet terms by shared non-analyzed keyword field values.