Refiners and Faceted Navigation

Refiners and Faceted Navigation : This lesson describes how dynamic navigation and facets work and how they are used.

Lesson Objectives

The objective is to describe the basic concepts behind dynamic navigation and facets.

Refiners

You can add refiners to a page to help users quickly browse to specific content. Refiners are based on managed properties from the search index and are managed through the Publishing Portal site collection.

There are two types of refiners (both are based on managed properties):

• Stand-alone refiners
• Refiners for faceted navigation

Stand-alone refiners are usually applied in scenarios where you have unstructured content, and where the refiners can be applied across all content. These refiners are often used on a search results page to narrow down search results. An example is brand or color that applies to all products.Microsoft Dynamkics Retail.

However, on a product site, we handle a number of different product categories, each with specific needs. For cameras, the number of pixels might be of interest, whereas the hard drive is important for computers.

We use a Content Search Web Part to display content on our category page. Because the Content Search Web Part uses search technology to display search results, we can use refiners to narrow search results that appear in the Content Search Web Part.SharePoint Developer

Adding refiners for faceted navigation is done on the tagging term set on the authoring side. When you specify which refiners to use in which category, it is helpful to use the tagging term set as a guide.

In our Contoso scenario, this is the Product Hierarchy term set. By default, when refiner’s label appears, the label displays the name of the Managed Property. If that is not what you need, you must specify the label which will be displayed for the label corresponding to the managed property.

By default, all children of a term inherit refiners that have been added to a parent term. For example, a refiner that is added to the term “Cameras” applies to all its children, such as “Camcorders” or “Camera accessories.”  You can override this inheritance to add or remove refiners for a child category.