Facets | Episerver Developer Community

Facets

This topic explains the concept of facets in Episerver Search & Navigation (formerly Episerver Find). Facets are used for grouping documents based on some criterion, for example, specific terms or date range. Typical usages are tag clouds and faceted navigation, which let site visitors restrict search results to selected categories, such as product types, price ranges, or author names.

How it works

Facets provide aggregated data based on a search query, and are requested and retrieved along with regular search requests. Note that they are scoped for the search query by default.

Elastic Search, upon which Episerver Search & Navigation is built, features several facets ranging from simple to advanced, such as Terms, Range, Statistical and Geo Distance.

The .NET client API in Search & Navigation supports facets based on:

Facets and filters

Normally, facets are affected by filters, just like search results. However, via the FilterHits method, you can retrieve facets without applying the filters applied to search results . Therefore, it's good to read up on the Filter and FilterHits methods, because there are significant differences between them when working with facets.