Fields with Facets

Faceted fields are an important part of Insight. Simply explained, a facet is a field with an index built on it, and that index contains the unique values of the field. Just by looking at the values in a field with a facet, you can immediately see how many records have that value. This can be a great time saver when you want quick information, such as how many records you have that are marked privileged.

Values and document counts can be accessed from several locations within Insight and are very helpful when exploring your data. For example, if your From field has a facet and you look at the From values, you can see that the first value listed is the person who authored the most documents in your document population.

Within Insight, all fields except for some custom fields have facets. Facets do not have to be built on all fields. For example if you add fields to your site that are not fields from our Insight Fields List, they will not have facets; however, fields without Facets are still searchable. Fields containing mostly unique values (such as the DocID field) should not have facets. In fact, building a facet on a field with mostly unique values may affect the performance of your site.

You only need facets on fields if they that meet the following criteria:

• The field needs to be sortable

• The field needs to be available in the Group By action

• The field needs to be used in the Dynamic Folders structure

• The field needs to be used in Charts for reporting purposes

• The field is a Date field and needs to be searched using ranges (>, <, between)

Limits on the Number of Facets per Site

Insight’s search engine, Mark Logic, does have a limit to the number of indexes for a site. This is why we have built facets on the fields contained in our Fields List. If we go beyond the limit, performance is degraded. Indexes are built on fields that contain facets, but are also built for other purposes within Insight. Since our goal is to handle ten to hundreds of millions of documents without affecting speed and performance, we need to limit the number of indexes.

There are spare fields within the Fields List that have facets built on them and should provide more than enough fields with facets.