To use facets on your site, you create JSP pages that display the facet selections as hyperlinks. When a customer clicks one of these links, a query is issued to Oracle ATG Web Commerce Search. The search results returned are then displayed on the page. These results include only those items whose faceting property value is the selected value or falls within the selected range. The available facet selections are also updated to reflect the selections previously made. This process continues as the customer clicks further links.

To create pages that enable Faceted Search, you use the following classes:

The pages you write should not be associated with specific facets or selections. Instead, they should be written in a generic way, to be able to handle any set of facets defined in Oracle ATG Web Commerce Merchandising. Typically you write one primary page that deals with displaying the facets and manipulating the facet trail, and that page is re-rendered each time new results are returned. The remaining sections in this chapter describe how to do this.

Note: In ATG 2007.1 and earlier, faceted search queries and responses were handled through the atg.repository.search.refinement.FacetSearchDroplet and atg.commerce.search.refinement.CommerceFacetSearchService classes. These classes were deprecated in ATG 9.0, and atg.search.formhandlers.QueryFormHandler was modified to support faceted search queries and responses. As of Oracle ATG Web Commerce 10, the FacetSearchDroplet, CommerceFacetSearchService, and related classes have been removed from the distribution. If your faceted search implementation is based on these classes, you must rewrite your JSPs to use QueryFormHandler instead.