Result Grouping

[anthonycook]

The Problem

Here is an example of an e-commerce search that has multiple variations of a product:

{
 "name": "iPhone 14 Pro",
 "color": "Gold",
 "capacity": "128gb"
},
{
 "name": "iPhone 14 Pro",
 "color": "Space Black",
 "capacity": "128gb"
},
{
 "name": "iPhone 14 Pro",
 "color": "Deep Purple",
 "capacity": "128gb"
}

If I was to perform a search for "iPhone", it would return all of the results which in this example is over 16 variants, currently I believe there is no way to group these into one result.

How Others Approach This

In SQL we could use GROUP BY and Apache Solr archives this with FeildCollapsing and the groupValue field (see here)

I can think of many applications where grouping would be needed, like customer activity logs where say we want to group by email address etc.

[gmourier]

Hi @anthonycook 👋

I have some questions that may help us to know more about your needs.

What do you expect in terms of response using a group by clause?

Is there a need to determine it on the fly at search time?

There are the distinctAttribute settings, but it will only return the first iPhone 14 Pro found if you specify name as the distinct attribute.

Thanks!

[anthonycook]

Hi @gmourier 👋

A response from a group clause could look something like this

{
    "hits": [
        {
            "name": "iPhone 14 Pro",
            "hits": [
                {
                    "color": "Gold",
                    "capacity": "128gb"
                },
                {
                    "color": "Space Black",
                    "capacity": "128gb"
                },
                {
                    "color": "Deep Purple",
                    "capacity": "128gb"
                }
            ]
        }
    ]
}

An example request could be something like this

{
    "q": "iPhone 14 Pro Max",
    "group": [
        "name"
    ]
}

I can't think of any reason why this would need to be done on the fly, maybe you could have a groupableAttributes field in index settings?

[gmourier]

Thanks, @anthonycook!

We could eventually rework the distinctAttribute one to be named differently, accepting multiple fields in an array. At search time, you could define the number of elements to get for a group. If you specify 1, you would get the original behavior of the distinctAttribute setting.

WDYT about it?

Pinging @Kerollmops