Disabled refinements represent those refinements that end users could reach if they were to remove some of the top-level filters that have been already selected from their current navigation state.

A core capability of the MDEX Engine is the ability to provide meaningful navigation options to the users at each step in the guided navigation process. As part of this approach, the MDEX Engine does not return "dead ends" -- these are refinements under which no records are present. In other words, at each step in the guided navigation, the users are presented with a list of refinements that are valid based on their current navigation state.

In many front-end applications, it is desirable to have a user interface that enables users to see the impact of their refinement selections. In particular, once the users make their initial selections of dimensions and refine by one or more of them, it is often useful to see not only the refinements that are available at each step in the navigation but also the disabled refinements that would have been available if some of the other selections were made.

Such refinements are typically displayed in the front-end application as grayed out, that is, they are not valid for clicking in the current state but could be valid if the navigation state were to change.

To configure disabled refinements, you do not need to change the Oracle Commerce project configuration XML files used with Forge, Workbench, and Developer Studio. You also do not change any settings in Oracle Commerce Workbench and Developer Studio. No changes are required to existing Forge pipelines. The index format of the Dgidx output does not change.

You configure the display of the disabled refinements on a per query basis. You can do this using Presentation API methods, or URL parameters. For information, see the topics in this section.


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