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Using faceted navigation with meta collections

this article applies to Funnelback 15.6 and earlier. In Funnelback 15.8 faceted navigation is edited and published in the same manner as for a normal collection.

Background

This article covers the steps required to configure facet navigation when working with a meta collection. A number of manual steps are required.

Pre-requisites

Ensure that you have setup and configured your meta collection and component sub-collections

Supported facet types

The following facet types are supported with meta collections

  • Metadata Field Fill

  • Date Field Fill

  • URL Fill

  • GScope Item

Unsupported facet types

The following facet types are not supported with meta collections

  • XML Item Fill

  • Metadata Fill

  • Query Item

These items are not supported as they rely on dynamic allocation of metadata class and gscope mappings that are applied at index time.

Configuring the meta collection

Create a faceted_navigation.cfg file. This can be done via the customise faceted navigation function within the Funnelback administration interface.

Configure the facets ensuring that only supported types are selected.

Metadata classes and gscopes are merged from component collections

When configuring metadata based facets (Metadata fill), the metadata mappings defined in the component collections apply. All metadata assigned to a particular metadata class in each of the collections will be aggregated.

When configuring gscope based facets (GScope Item), the gscope definitions for the component collections apply.

It is often a good idea to use the same metadata and gscope mappings across all component collections to ensure that the assignments are applied consistently (and that any overlap in mappings is intended). This can be done by maintaining the gscopes.cfg, metamap.cfg and xml.cfg on the meta collection and symbolically linking these from the component collection’s configuration folder.

Configuring the component collections

  1. Ensure that the component collections have appropriate metadata mappings in place to match any metadata classes that are assigned via the faceted navigation configuration for the meta collection.

  2. Ensure that the component collections have appropriate gscope definitions in place to match any gscope facets that are assigned via the faceted navigation configuration for the meta collection.

  3. If using metadata based facets (Metadata fill) ensure that the -ifb indexer option is set on all component collections (indexer_options= -ifb) (Required for Funnelback 14.2 and earlier - in Funnelback 15.0 and new the -ifb option is on by default).

  4. Set a post_update_command for each sub-collection to the following (replacing meta collection name with the name of your meta collection). This command means that after each sub-collection updates the faceted_navigation.cfg defined for the meta collection is copied into the meta collection’s live index directory. This post update command is set in the meta collection’s collection.cfg.

    # Windows
post_update_command=copy $SEARCH_HOME\conf\<meta collection name>\faceted_navigation.cfg $SEARCH_HOME\data\<meta collection name>\live\idx\faceted_navigation.xml

# Linux
post_update_command=cp $SEARCH_HOME/conf/<meta collection name>/faceted_navigation.cfg $SEARCH_HOME/data/<meta collection name>/live/idx/faceted_navigation.xml

  5. Ensure that the component collections are updated after any change to metamap.cfg, xml.cfg or gscopes.cfg.