Filters
In Sitecore Search, by configuring filters, your visitors can get to the content or products they want quickly.
A filter works with our search algorithms to limit items by type and attributes. Depending on your use case, they can be displayed in the UI for your visitors to use or they can be used to show a subset of results.
In the following image, shirt sizes are displayed as radio buttons which the user can select. The code behind the UI adds selected values to the search request as filters which are used to narrow results.
Filters using attributes can be configured in the Filters section on the Feature Configuration tab in the Domain Settings section.
Use cases
Here are some use cases for the use of filters in your Search implementation.
Comparing a string
Conducting a search using a keyword is a typical example of filters. Often your indexed items can contain a keyword in different cases such as lowercase, uppercase, title case, or sentence case. A visitor might enter the same keyword not matching any of the common cases.
To filter for the keyword it is recommended to transform both the indexed attribute value and the input text as lowercase strings before comparison.
We recommend configuring the attribute to used as a filter and always forcing comparisons as a lowercase string. The filter does not change the indexed values but applies only at runtime.
Multiple value operators
Visitors might want to conduct search using a phrase. By default, Search splits the phrase into individual words and returns items that contain anyone one of them. This is the OR operator. If you configure a filter to use the AND operator, the results contain items that contain all the words in the phrase irrespective of the order.
We recommend using the AND operator in cases where an exact match is essential.
Adding filters in the user interface
In addition to search input fields, your website or application can include UI components to add extra filters in search requests. Your developer needs to include required code in search requests.
Here are some examples of filtered results that are often requested after visitor interaction:
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Articles published in a visitor specified date range.
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Store listings within a geographical area.
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List of videos the registered visitor has not yet seen.