Feature Request: Return count for documents which are possible to select

[Neil Ireson]

Hi all,

Whilst Solr is a great resource (a big thank you to the developers) it 
presents me with a couple of issues.

The need for hierarchical facets I would say is a fairly crucial missing 
piece but has already been pointed out 
(http://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/SOLR-64).

The other issue relates to providing (count) feedback for disjoint 
selections. When a facet value is selected this constrains the documents 
and solr returns the counts for all the other facet values. Thus the 
user can see all the possible valid selections (i.e. having a count >0) 
and the number of documents which will be returned if that value is 
selected. However one of the valid selections is to select another value 
in the facet, creating a disjoint selection and increasingly the number 
of returned documents. However there is currently no way for the user to 
know which values are valid to select as the count only relates to 
currently selected documents and not documents which are also still 
possible to select.

I hope this is clear, it's not the easiest issue to explain (or perhaps 
I just do it badly). Anyway other Faceted Browsers, such as the Simile 
Project's Exhibit, do return counts showing the effect of disjoint 
selections which is more useful for the user.


N



PS I'm unsure whether this should be posted to the developer's list so I 
posted here first.