Checkbox Counter in facets

[FrancescoBrunoDev]

Hello everyone,

I would like to know if there is a way similar to the one available in facets to have a counter.

For example, I can do:

[Results]
online_available = translation

and this, like always, shows a counter. However,

[CheckboxFacets]
online_access: true = "ReadOnline"

does not display the corresponding counter.

Thank you for any feedback.

[demiankatz]

@FrancescoBrunoDev, the challenge here is that checkbox filters support complex queries, whereas other filters use simple values. Solr provides counts for basic facets, but in order to get counts for checkbox filters, we would need to perform additional Solr requests or restructure the way we are currently requesting the data from Solr. This is certainly not impossible, but it would come with performance costs.

I believe it is possible that someone somewhere has already implemented this as a local customization. I will highlight this discussion link on the vufind-tech mailing list to see if anyone there has anything to share.

I'm also open to adding this feature in the future if we can find a reasonably straightforward and efficient way to accomplish it.

[FrancescoBrunoDev]

Thank you @demiankatz for the prompt feedback. I understand the issue, and thanks for bringing it up on vufind-tech. Appreciate it!

[befehl]

As @demiankatz said, the count of Facets is included in the result of a search, whereras the checkbox filters are Filters which are set before a search and therefore have no count.
They also can be complex. Example:
[CheckboxFacets]
format:Journal OR format:Newspaper OR format:Serial = "Periodicals only"
format:eBook OR format:Electronic OR format:Database = "Online resources only"

Afaik only solution is subsearches after each search.

[demiankatz]

I seem to recall that somebody might have implemented some solution that used AJAX calls to perform the checkbox queries asynchronously in order to fill in counts... but I may be misremembering, and as noted above, that obviously has performance implications. :-)

[befehl]

AJAX calls or anything else, a search is a search.
One optimazation I can think of is to do a subsearch without asking for results or anythin else, just only the count of the search.

[EreMaijala]

I seem to recall that somebody might have implemented some solution that used AJAX calls to perform the checkbox queries asynchronously in order to fill in counts... but I may be misremembering, and as noted above, that obviously has performance implications. :-)

That'd be me, I guess. :) References, with the caveat that this indeed only works for simple field:value type checkbox facets:

1. https://github.com/NatLibFi/NDL-VuFind2/blob/dev/module/Finna/src/Finna/AjaxHandler/GetSideFacets.php#L127
2. https://github.com/NatLibFi/NDL-VuFind2/blob/dev/module/Finna/src/Finna/AjaxHandler/GetSideFacets.php#L56
3. https://github.com/NatLibFi/NDL-VuFind2/blob/dev/module/Finna/src/Finna/Search/Solr/Params.php#L332

[FrancescoBrunoDev]

Hey @EreMaijala , thank you so much for sharing!