Item Catalog Search Index Enhancements

OM provides feature to store all extended item catalog data in the form of additional attributes. This feature also allows us to setup any type of complex structure between itemid and extended catalog data. Internally the product uses “Additional attributes” entity to create this type of setup. OM also provides the ability to search these attributes to fetch relevant items by building apache lucene search. OM also provides feature to restrict the item search space using the item category and the same item attributes. All these are via the searchCatalogIndex api.

However there are some deficiencies with this setup and it doesn’t really help using the index for fine grained item search:

1. The apache lucene index builds the index with hard-coded string ‘AdditionalAttribute’ as the index field name
2. When a subset of item attributes are added to the item category and the category path is passed in the input to the searchCatalogIndex api to search for the data, we are not sure whether the index search is efficient enough to only search the attributes configured under that category.

So we would like to log the following enhancement requests:

1. Ability to build the search index with “Indexfield Name” as the AdditionalAttribute Name instead of hard-coding to ‘AdditionalAttribute’
2. Ability to have ‘Condition’ like attribute in the ‘For Filter’ : Presently the apache ‘Term’ feature supports ‘condition’ based search. We need a similar attribute on the ‘For’ filter. Reasons being the enhanced ability to query the index fields by constructing the query at runtime.