Product Search Engine Design with Sphinx and Faceted Search

[Colin_Law1 (Colin Law)]

I think there may be something wrong with your model. Firstly I think you need
Category
has_many :products
has_many :attribute_types

Product
belongs_to :category
has_many :attributes

AttributeType
belongs_to :category
has_many :attributes

Attribute
belongs_to :product
belongs_to :attribute_type

Is there a problem with the above? If one has a product
then product.category.attribute types will give one a collection of
attribute types relevant to that model. One could also use product.attributes to get a
collection of attributes, but since each attribute has an associated
attribute type one can also get the attribute types for a product by
this route. I am no database expert, so I may be wrong, but I suspect
that it is not a good idea to have two separate relationship routes between
models like this.

My other problem is that I am not sure what you are trying to achieve. Can you explain in a couple of sentences what data you wish to extract when the user clicks on the Book category for example?

Colin

[11175]

Hi thank you for your answer

The models you wrote are ok, I just simplified them for illustration
purposes.

My problem is with search facets (filtering) using Thinking Sphinx.
Suppose that I had a book model with the fields author, publisher and
year. When a customer select the book category, he will be presented
with a list of books and on the left side, he will have the "facets"
like that:

authors
-author 1 (203)
-author 2 (125)
-author 3 (99)
-author 4 (38)
...

publishers
-publisher1 (199)
-publisher1 (21)
-publisher1 (408)
-publisher1 (134)
...

years
-2009 (109)
-2008 (33)
-2007 (12)
-2006 (500)
...

This would be very easy if I had a book model. Thinking Sphinx requires
a facet to be defined like this on the "book" model:

define_index do
  indexes author, :facet => true
  indexes publisher, :facet => true
  indexes year, :facet => true
end

THE PROBLEM IS THAT I DO NOT HAVE THIS MODEL AND THIS ATTRIBUTES
DEFINED. I don't have this defined because I would have to know all the
product types and all the possible attributes for each product type and
create a different model for each product type.

[Colin_Law1 (Colin Law)]

I understand. Sorry, I do not know enough about how the inner workings of Sphinx to be able to help.

Can anyone else help?

Colin