Dynamic Fields Explained

Locator comes with a large number of factory prepared search fields that are tailored to known and well established Locator use cases across the Ayfie customer base. In addition Locator also has what is referred to as dynamic search fields that are template type fields that can be used as the basis for creating new customized search field on the fly to address unique customer requirements.

How to create, change and benefit from these dynamic fields is not part of this documentation, but covered in other guides and tutorials. This documentation has the narrow goal of just detailing the ability of each dynamic field.

To access the dynamic fields of any Locator instance, look up the file schema.xml in SOLR:

Open

Which dynamic field to use in each case dependent on the use case. What is the data type? Is it a string, a int or a date? Is the data to be part of the search result, or not? Is the data to be indexed and become searchable? Is the data a single value or an array of values? Is the data to be used in a refiner and would thus benefit from being structured differently for faster performance?

There is a one to one mapping between the answers to the questions above and the field name prefix to use. This is the prefix template where the t will be substituted by other letters and the s, i, m and d possibly removed:

Imagine we are to make a index field that is to hold company names. The full field name template would be something like this.

Here is a description of what to keep and what to change in the prefix:

• via - it is a fixed mandatory prefix that is short for viaWorks that was an earlier product name for Locator. The prefix is used to differentiate between original SOLR fields and fields added by Ayfie during development.

• T - type is mandatory and the T is a placeholder for anything from 1 to 3 other characters indicating the type: b, dtp, ll, lt, lp, nav, s, t, dbp, fp, ip

• s - stored (s) or not stored (nothing) indicates whether the field will be part of the search result or not

• i - indexed (i) or not indexed (nothing) indicates whether one will be able to search for the data in the field or not

• m - multi valued (m) or single valued (nothing) indicates whether the field hold a single value or an array of values

• d - docValues makes refiners performs faster

The table below list all dynamic fields in Locator post version 3.x:

The Legacy Prefix column refer to the field names used in Locator 2.x and earlier.