It's usually a good approach to setup a property just to facilitate easier search queries. In this case it sounds like the UX is listing product so put a new property there where you iterate all variants and add the values in some useful structure.

Johan,

Sorry I missed the post over my holiday and just recently started to work on the project again. The client really wants them to be dynamic and control attribute in a central database. They want the ability to add many new attributes at will and not require development when they do so.

My initial plan was to use a dictionary, but this plan is made invalid by finding out yesterday that some productvariants may have multiple values per attribute. This means even properties of IEnumerable wouldn't work either as I don't believe you can build facets from nested objects with IEnumerables.

I understand you're advocating for bringing the properties up to the product level. This wouldn't produce the desired result either as we want to find the product where the productvariant meets the given criteria.

IE The actual structure of the product, productvariants would be:

• Product
  • ProductVariant
    • Color = Brown
    • Material = Steel
  • ProductVariant2
    • Color = Black
    • Material = Wood

Your suggesting the Find structure would be:

• Product
  • Colors = {Brown, Black}
  • Materials = {Steel, Wood}

This would result in a hit for {Color = Brown, Material = Wood}, but in reality neither of the productvariants are hits, so the product should not be displayed.

I don't think this is difficult when writing your own search, but I don't believe it's possible with Find as is right now. Some other ideas I have:

• two requests to Find - one for variants and the other for products, but that sounds slow and will use up extra queries,
• move ProductVariants up to the Product level, but that is not desired from both a product page or administration point of view,
• move some properties to the ProductVariant level and search for ProductVariant which links to the Product page.

Do you have any other ideas? Is there any hope to have nested facets work with IEnumerables?

Hi Michael,

We currently have the exact same dilemma you described.  Wondering if you ever got anywhere with this, or what solution you ultimately went with ?

Thanks!