Advanced development with eZ Find - part 2 : Indexing additional fields in Solr
Tuesday 15 June 2010 5:20:10 am
Step 1 : Presenting the case
The presented case has been chosen for its high educational value. It is a frequently requested feature, is relatively simple to implement and properly illustrates the underlying concept.
News websites, or blog post lists on blogs often propose to filter the content by year, or by a combination of year and month. Usually in this case, a template operator is developed which builds the appropriate SQL queries. This can quickly become complicated, and often has sharp limitations. Taking a look at the eZArchive operator helps understanding what I mean here.
Frequently, the complex SQL machinery required suffers from functional lacks, like access control propagation, language handling, unability to leverage some subtleties of MySQL or PostGreSql. The developer necessarily has to deal with these problematics, since the API is circumvented to directly write SQL statements. Another limitation of this approach is illustrated by the eZArchive operator : only the 'publication_date' parameter is taken into account, and no room is left for using a content-class-specific date attribute.
Let us see how we can develop a year and year & month filter with eZ Find.
eZ Find date facets