azure search. What if I have a lot of facets

Question

in a commercial application it is not uncommun to have hundreds facets. Of course not all products are flaged with all of them.

But when searching I need to add a facet querystring parameter that list all the facets that I want to get back. As I don't know by advance the list of relevant one, I have to pass all of them in the query. This is not practical we more than a few facets.

Is there a way to solve this issue or is it a limitation of the product?

The Azure Search doc:

https://msdn.microsoft.com/fr-fr/library/azure/dn798927.aspx

Maritzamariupol

Answer 1

It looks like Azure Search now supports both a GET and POST method, and recommends using POST when the length of the URL would exceed the max limit of 2048 characters (1024 for just the querystring).

https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/rest/api/searchservice/search-documents

Gestation

Answer 2

You are correct that this is a current limitation of Azure Search in that you need to pass all the facets in the query string. Please know that we are aware of this and in fact it can be an even bigger issue for customers where they have so many parameters or facets in their query string that it exceeds the max size of the url. For this reason, we are investigating what can be done about this to accommodate this.

I apologize that I do not yet have a date for when this is to be available other than to say it is on our short term roadmap.

Liam

Daugherty

Any update on this? Would like to know if this is in the works or not as we need to design around this limitation. Is this solved when you POST to the search service vs. using a GET? – Acatalectic

has this been resolved yet, any guidance on dealing with many facets would be nice. – Taxation

Please vote on this User Voice item if you want to see Azure Search support requesting all facets without explicitly listing all the facetable fields: feedback.azure.com/forums/263029-azure-search/suggestions/… – Wilful