Refinements allow end users to explore their data records using Guided Navigation.
To utilize Guided Navigation, users first select a refinement and expand and collapse the available values. For a refinement that has a hierarchy, users can expand the refinement more than once.
To use refinements to narrow their results, end users select a specific refinement value. For example, to narrow results from all refrigerators to only white ones, users might choose the value "white" for the color refinement.
As they explore, users need to know what values are currently available for refinement. At any given step in the exploration process, the Endeca Server returns the list of available values for each refinement, and displays to the users only those refinements (attribute values) for which records exist in the resulting record set.
In other words, after a user creates a query using record and value search, only valid remaining refinement values are provided to the user to further refine that query. This allows the user to reduce the number of matching records without creating an invalid query.
To conclude, refinements are values presented to the users during Guided Navigation. They contain attribute values for the records loaded into the data domain.