At 8:24 PM -0800 1/22/07, Chris Hostetter wrote:
>: So now that we have negative queries, we don't really need any
>: additional/extra code for facet.missing. It could simply be
>: facet.query=-myfield:*, and that way it could be obtained without
>: getting facet.field results if desired.
>
>facet.missing can be used on a per field basis .. but i suspect a more
>natural usage of it is to just use facet.missing=true when "i always want
>to show the user a count for resutls that don't match any value for each
>of my facets"
I agree with Hoss that facet.missing on both a global and per-field basis is an
important parameter which should be retained. While negative-only queries are
a fantastic addition to SOLR (!), the general use-case for facet.missing is to
show "n/a" or "None" or "No authorship indicated" or whatever
application-specific value makes sense for a particular facet -- or to not show
anything at all for missing values, when that makes sense.
In fact, it would probably please too-lazy-to-translate-facet-value-strings
front-end coders if there were a way to provide a label for the missing count,
e.g.
<str name="facet.missinglabel">None</str>
<str name="f.author.facet.missinglabel">No authorship indicated</str>
Or better yet facet.missing itself could be a string rather than a boolean,
with the missing count suppressed if it is undefined, null, 'false', or empty,
and 'true' enabling it with a null label for reverse compatibility.
I'd be happy to add one or both to SimpleFacets if y'all thought it made sense.
- J.J.
