[OPEN-ILS-DEV] For-real faceting

[Mike Rylander]

Over the last couple months I've been working on (among other things)
two new Dojo Dijit-based interfaces for Evergreen, one for faceting of
search results and one for dynamic advanced search.  Attached you'll
find a patch that, as of this morning at about 3:30pm EDT, applies
cleanly to trunk and implements these things.  You'll also find a
tarball containing three new files that can be extracted in the top of
your trunk working directory.  Including these in the patch proved
cumbersome, so just drop them in place.

I would appreciate any poking folks would be willing to give the
patch, and I'd like to get it committed ASAP to avoid any more
bit-rot.  I'll describe here what it does, but seeing is believing, so
please poke at it if you have a moment or two.

Briefly, I have replaced the result page sidebar new-search trees
(implemented before "faceting" became a thing, and designed for
new-search, not drill-down) with and implementation of what has become
the generally accepted "way to do faceting".  This is implemented as a
Dojo Dijit, and the markup and code footprints within the OPAC proper
are small, just  a couple <div>s and a little bit of glue code to help
the facet rendering engine find the data it needs.  The set and order
of facet classes to display in a given facet bar (title, author,
subject, etc) is configurable in the markup, as are the number of
values displayed for each facet when collapsed (before the [More...]
button is pushed).

I've also created a Searcher Dijit which implements an embeddable
advanced search interface.  This is mainly useful for constructing
boolean-chained searches (we support AND and OR now, though they're
spelled && and || in the query string), and has the beginnings of
support for filters and modifiers.  Click the [Advanced] button under
the simple search box on the result page to see this in action.

I know some will want to discuss look-and-feel, and we can do that,
but I'm mainly concerned with whether the new functionality works as
you'd expect, and does what people want.  I personally think it's a
significant improvement in UI, and because it gathers its data in one
go instead of (up to) 24 post-load subrequests, it should be speed up
rendering of results pages a good bit.  It does for me in my testing,
at least.

TIA folks.

-- 
Mike Rylander
 | VP, Research and Design
 | Equinox Software, Inc. / The Evergreen Experts
 | phone:  1-877-OPEN-ILS (673-6457)
 | email:  miker at esilibrary.com
 | web:  http://www.esilibrary.com
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