Advanced Search development - 'homemade' fuzzy logic...

Monday 09 August 2004 1:07:01 am

Good morning!

To get you off to a great Monday start to the week I've got a horrible little conundrum for you!

I have a mammoth site build coming up, and want to use Ez to do it. Its an ecommerce site for diamonds and some associated jewellery, but mainly just sells stones.

One of the biggest challenges is creating the page that allows you to select certain criteria relating to stones (such as 'cut' and 'carat') - and getting the search results back listing the stones that fit your criteria.

To do this I'm intending to have 4 drop down lists which allow you to choose cut, carat, clarity and colour - now, afaik I can use http://ez.no/community/bug_reports/search_lacks_multi_attribute_queries if I want to search within specific attributes, so thats one issue solved.

The other issue is introducing some sort of fuzzy logic to the search results...

Lets take the variable 'carat' - and lets say it has values 1,2,3,4, and 5. My user searches carat values of 3. I want to build in a mechanism that says 'if there are no values '3', search on '2' and '4' as well' so I reduce the likelihood of getting zero results returned.

One way I thought of doing this was to have 2 fields in the diamond class for each attirbute - say for 'carat' I would have 'carat_actual' and 'carat_fuzzy'. Carat_actual would contain the real value of the stone (example: 2), whereas carat_fuzzy would be populated with the fuzzy values of the stones (example: 1, 3).

Then you'd use 2 fetches to create youer results. The first fetch would search only the 'carat_actual' values, the second fetch would search the 'carat_fuzzy' values - the search results would be ordered by 'show contents of first fetch, then show contents of second fetch' - so the most accurate results are at the top.

My questions are:

- Does this seem like the right way to create this search functionality? If so, can anyone help me/give some pointers with the construction of the fetchs to create the search results?

- Is there a simpler or more effective way of creating this type of functionality?

Thoughts on this would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks, Steve.

http://www.oneworldmarket.co.uk

Monday 09 August 2004 4:14:14 am

Ekke,

Thanks very much for the response.

I'll take a look at the contrib and let you know how I get on.

Regards, Steve.

http://www.oneworldmarket.co.uk

Thursday 19 August 2004 4:26:06 am

Hello!

Really hoping someone could give me input on this!

As far as I can tell I'm going to want a plain-vanilla search going on, just that the search needs to stack 2 fetches - the first exact one, the second fuzzy one - and use these to generate the results?

Am I barking up the wrong tree, is there an easier way to achieve this?

Ideas and thoughts greatly appreciated!

Regards, Steve.

http://www.oneworldmarket.co.uk

Thursday 19 August 2004 5:35:43 am

Paul,

Thankyou for the reply.

Without wanting to push for too much spoon-feeding, do you have any code examples you could copy/paste into this thread?

Regards, Steve.

http://www.oneworldmarket.co.uk

Friday 20 August 2004 5:14:19 am

Hi

You can use the 'in' filter operator after applying the contributed patch (for 3.4.1):

Edited: added missing 5th ')'

{let fuzzyresults=fetch(content,tree,hash(parent_node_id, <nodeid>, attribute_filter,
 array(and(array('yourclass/attribute','in','(3,5)')))))
nonfuzzyresults=fetch(content,tree,hash(parent_node_id, <nodeid>, attribute_filter, 
array(and(array('yourclass/attribute','=','4')))))
}
{* do fuzzy and non-fuzzy things *}

{/let}

eZ Publish, eZ Find, Solr expert consulting and training
http://twitter.com/paulborgermans

Monday 23 August 2004 7:37:06 am

Paul,

I've applied the patch, and initial tests are looking good :-) One problem I am seeing, using a fetch of:

{let fuzzyresults=fetch(content,tree,hash(parent_node_id, 59, attribute_filter,
 array(and(array('203','in','(7,8,6)'))), array('204','in','(7)')))
}

Is that the fetch isnt using the the class attribute '204' in an exclusive sense...

i.e. its fetching items that have 'in' values either in class attribute '203' and '204' - I want it to only fetch records that match *both* these conditions.

Is it possible to do this as my fetch will eventually be searching on 4 class attributes?

Regards, Steve.

http://www.oneworldmarket.co.uk

Monday 23 August 2004 7:54:07 am

It should work, but the template code you posted is wrong:

This is what it should be:

{let fuzzyresults=fetch(content,tree,hash(parent_node_id, 59, attribute_filter,
 array(and,array('203','in','(7,8,6)'), array('204','in','(7)'))))
}

I would suggest to use also the class/attribute identifiers (alphanulmeric), instead of the numeric attribute id. Be aware also that the attributes must belong to the same class.

-paul

eZ Publish, eZ Find, Solr expert consulting and training
http://twitter.com/paulborgermans

Monday 23 August 2004 8:37:19 am

Thanks to both of you, fetch is now operating properly!

Steve.

http://www.oneworldmarket.co.uk

Monday 23 August 2004 9:55:14 am

Steve

1)
Wildcards are not possible with 'in', you need to use 'like':

array('stone_product/fcarat','like','%6%')

2)

You can use the limit parameter in your 2 individual fetches, but not something combined for both (and you would need some way of defining what is are the top 3 results in a combined case).

hth

-paul

eZ Publish, eZ Find, Solr expert consulting and training
http://twitter.com/paulborgermans

Monday 23 August 2004 10:44:24 am

Hi Steve,

I would use something like this:

{let page_limit=3
     exact_matches=fetch(content,tree,hash(....., limit, $page_limit,....))
     fuzzy_matches=array()}
{section show=count($exact_matches)|lt($page_limit)}
  {set fuzzy_matches=fetch(content,tree,hash(....., limit, sub($page_limit,count($exact_matches)),....)}
{/section}

This will fetch maximum 3 exact matches. The {section} part is only executed if the count of $exact_matches is less than the page limit (3 in this case). If it executes, it will only fetch fuzzy matches until you have the number of results defined in $page_limit. If it doesn't execute, $fuzzy_matches remains an empty array.

This might not be totally what you want but it could get you started :-)

--
Hans

Hans
http://blog.hansmelis.be