This chapter provides information on handling and displaying
refinements in your Web application.
About refinements
Endeca standard and managed attributes are known as refinements. Refinements can be used for navigation and search — when you select a specific refinement, you refine your result set.
Displaying refinements in Studio
Each component that is affected by the Guided Navigation component uses refinements and information received from refinements computation, such as the order of refinements or a number of refinements for a given attribute.
Configuring the global order of refinements
You configure the global order for the values of a refinement by sending this configuration request to the Oracle Endeca Server with the Configuration Web Service, or by using Integrator.
Configuring refinement counts
You configure whether to show record counts for an attribute by changing the value in the system-navigation_ShowRecordCounts attribute in the PDR, using either the Configuration Web Service or Integrator.
About multi-select attributes
A multi-select attribute is an attribute that can be present on records multiple times, with different values, in a single navigation state.
About externally managed attributes
Web applications powered by the Oracle Endeca Server can use managed attributes created with a taxonomy management tool.
Working with refinements using the API
This section provides examples of Conversation Web Service requests and responses that let you retrieve various aspects of the refinement configuration — refinements themselves, their order, counts, and special types of refinements, such as those that are multi-select.
Performance impact of refinement ordering
You can use the --esampmin option with the Dgraph process, to specify the minimum number of records to sample during refinement computation.