There are two general facet properties: Faceting Property and Name. Faceting Property refers to the product property used to organize products into virtual selections. A facet that displays products organized by price might have a Faceting Property set to child SKU List Price.
Note that a product accesses the properties of its child SKUs, so the faceting property includes most SKU properties as well as most product properties by default. One side effect to this capability is that if a product has two SKUs and a different price for each, a price facet may represent the product twice in its selections: once for each SKU.
If you want to modify the properties available to be faceting properties, by adding custom properties or removing out-of-the-box properties, follow the instructions provided in the Repository Indexing chapter of the ATG Commerce Search Guide. All properties indexed by the search engine are automatically included in the Faceting Property dropdown list.
The properties you see when you select a facet depend on the Faceting Property you selected. If you change the Faceting Property and then change back to the original value, you are likely to lose property values you set previously. If you want to use a different Faceting property for a given facet, it may be simpler to create a new facet.
It’s important to note that if all products have the same value for the Faceting property, for example, all products are on sale so the on sale property, which is used as the faceting property, is set to true, the facet is ignored and no selections are displayed. If selections were generated in this situation, there would be just one, holding all products, which is unnecessary and not useful.
The name you give to a facet should loosely represent the Faceting Property you choose. The facet that organizes products by price mentioned earlier might be called Price. Name your facets in a way that makes it clear how products are organized by it.
