Search Relevance Weight

Hint

See the Search Index documentation to get a more high-level understanding of the search index concept in the Oro application.

This article describes the purpose of search relevance weigh and describes the way to customize this relevance in the website search index.

Search relevance weight (also called search weight or search relevance) is a positive decimal number that affects the order of search results. It is used as a multiplier for the original relevance calculated by the search engine.

The original search relevance may differ depending on the search query and additional conditions. The multiplier enables a developer to change the original search relevance which in turn changes the order of the results.

From the code level perspective, search relevance weight is just another search index decimal field called relevance_weight. This name is stored in the Oro\Bundle\SearchBundle\Engine\IndexerInterface::WEIGHT_FIELD constant that enables a developer to fill this field with the data during the indexation and pass it to the search engine. Then the search engine will start processing the data.

The default search relevance weight is 1.0. If no custom value is specified for this multiplier, then the original search engine relevance is used.

Relevance Weight Customization

To customize search relevance weight, add an event listener to fill the relevance_weight field using the oro_website_search.event.index_entity event (or a similar event for a specific entity, such as oro_website_search.event.index_entity.product) and an associated Oro\Bundle\WebsiteSearchBundle\Event\IndexEntityEvent event class.

First, create an event listener class:

namespace Acme\Bundle\DemoBundle\EventListener;

use Oro\Bundle\ProductBundle\Entity\Product;
use Oro\Bundle\SearchBundle\Engine\IndexerInterface;
use Oro\Bundle\WebsiteSearchBundle\Event\IndexEntityEvent;

class SetWebsiteSearchRelevanceWeightListener
{
    /**
     * @param IndexEntityEvent $event
     * @return void
     */
    public function onIndexEntity(IndexEntityEvent $event): void
    {
        /** @var Product $product */
        foreach ($event->getEntities() as $product) {
            $relevanceWeight = $this->calculateRelevanceWeight($product);
            $event->addField($product->getId(), IndexerInterface::WEIGHT_FIELD, $relevanceWeight);
        }
    }

    /**
     * @param Product $product
     * @return float
     */
    private function calculateRelevanceWeight(Product $product): float
    {
        switch ($product->getInventoryStatus()->getId()) {
            case Product::INVENTORY_STATUS_IN_STOCK:
                return 1.0;
            case Product::INVENTORY_STATUS_OUT_OF_STOCK:
                return 0.5;
            default:
                return 0.3;
        }
    }
}

Then, register this event listener in the DI container:

acme_test.event_listener.website_search.set_website_search_relevance_weight:
    class: Acme\Bundle\DemoBundle\EventListener\SetWebsiteSearchRelevanceWeightListener
    tags:
        - { name: kernel.event_listener, event: oro_website_search.event.index_entity.product, method: onIndexEntity }

Specify a mapping for the added relevance_weight field in the Resources/config/oro/website_search.yml file if it was not specified before:

Oro\Bundle\ProductBundle\Entity\Product:
    fields:
      -
        name: relevance_weight
        type: decimal

Finally, clear the cache using the php bin/console cache:clear --env=prod command and trigger reindexation of the required entity using the php bin/console oro:website-search:reindex --class="Oro\Bundle\ProductBundle\Entity\Product" --env=prod command.