How to create a facet in Sitecore Content Search (Lucene) based on Real Time Data?

Question

With Sitecore Content Search configuration is it possible to support the addition of a field which is populated with a value at search time, not index time? The population would be from an in-memory data structure for performance.

Essentially without re-indexing the values need to be updated/accessed, examples for this real time field would be Facebook Likes, In Stock, or Real Time Pricing. This data would then be used for faceting such as items with a range of Facebook likes, in-stock versus out-of-stock, or real time price facets.

Answer 1

You can leverage the Sitecore dynamic index. The idea is to query your "large" index from within your in-memory index which you'll use dynamically. The implementation is relatively easy.

More info: http://www.sitecore.net/en-gb/learn/blogs/technical-blogs/sitecore-7-development-team/posts/2013/04/sitecore-7-dynamic-indexes.aspx

Answer 2

The content search api does the searching on an iindexable, so I would look into that - you'd probably have to implement this interface yourself. More info here:

http://www.sitecore.net/learn/blogs/technical-blogs/sitecore-7-development-team/posts/2013/04/sitecore-7-search-operations-explained.aspx

If you need to search on data that is not in the index I would question whether sitecore search is the best option here. If the data needs to be searched in real time then maybe a database would suffice.

If the data set is large and you need realtime access then maybe a nosql database such as MongoDB might be the right choice. Hope this has given you some ideas and you reach a solution