Facets are assets you design to organize virtual groupings of products based on a product property value. When you implement facets in site pages, you see groupings that appear as a range of selections named for product property values or letters in the alphabet that represent them. By clicking an A-C selection, you can view products, for example, that have a manufacturer name that begins with those letters.
Creating facets involves selecting a faceting property (Manufacturer Name, in this example) and making a general decision on how selections will be organized. In order for your facets to be useful, you need to consider how you want to control the way your selections are generated. If you want dynamically generated selections, approximately how many and how many property values should be represented in each. Or, if selections are fixed, should each represent one property value or a range?
This section provides guidance on setting those and other facet property values, which are visible when you select a facet in the Navigation pane (see Facet View). Before you define specific facets, it’s a good idea to develop a design for the facets on your site because facets can have a complex inheritance and nesting strategy. For guidance, see Designing a Site with Multiple Facets.
Use the following sections to learn how to set facet properties:
Once you’ve created and defined facet settings, you can see how ATG Search implements them on your Web site, by running sample tests as described in Performing Search Tests. If selections aren’t displaying on your site, one of the following situations may have occurred:
All products available to a facet have the same value for the Faceting Property. See Setting General Facet Properties.
The rules you provide for building selections are too restrictive and can’t be applied to your products. See Setting the Defining Selections Property.
