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 provides two ways to customize this relevance in the standard 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 

There are two main ways how search relevance weight can be passed to the search index:

  • via the mapping of a custom decimal field

  • via an event listener.

Custom Decimal Field 

To use this approach, add a new custom decimal field to the required entity and then map it to the relevance_weight field. This way the application automatically fills the field with the appropriate value from this custom field, so a developer should only add certain data to the relevance_weight field.

For example, to add a value to the Business Unit entity:

  1. Add a custom decimal field ( e.g. buSearchRelevance (precision=8, scale=2)) via the entity management in the UI or via the migration in code.

  2. Map this field to the relevance_weight field via the appropriate configuration in the Resources/config/oro/search.yml file. The file can be created in any bundle.

The illustration for this example is below:

search:
    Oro\Bundle\OrganizationBundle\Entity\BusinessUnit:
        fields:
            -
                name:                   buSearchRelevance
                target_type:            decimal
                target_fields:          [relevance_weight]

  1. Clear the cache using the php bin/console cache:clear --env=prod command.

  2. Restart all consumers.

If you have already populated values, you may need to run reindexation using the php bin/console oro:search:reindex --env=prod command to pass relevance weight to search index.

Event Listener 

This approach requires creation of an event listener responsible for dynamic calculation of search relevance weight and setting it during the entity reindexation. To create an event listener, use the oro_search.prepare_entity_map event and an associated Oro\Bundle\SearchBundle\Event\PrepareEntityMapEvent event class.

First, create an event listener class:

namespace Acme\Bundle\DemoBundle\EventListener;

use Oro\Bundle\OrganizationBundle\Entity\BusinessUnit;
use Oro\Bundle\SearchBundle\Engine\IndexerInterface;
use Oro\Bundle\SearchBundle\Event\PrepareEntityMapEvent;
use Oro\Bundle\SearchBundle\Query\Query;

class SetSearchRelevanceWeightListener
{
    /**
     * @param PrepareEntityMapEvent $event
     * @return void
     */
    public function onPrepareEntityMap(PrepareEntityMapEvent $event): void
    {
        $entity = $event->getEntity();

        // set higher search relevance weight for the specific business unit
        if ($entity instanceof BusinessUnit && $entity->getId() === 1) {
            $data = $event->getData();
            $data[Query::TYPE_DECIMAL][IndexerInterface::WEIGHT_FIELD] = 2.5;
            $event->setData($data);
        }
    }
}

Then, register this event listener in the DI container:

services:
    acme_test.event_listener.search.set_search_relevance_weight:
        class: Acme\Bundle\DemoBundle\EventListener\SetSearchRelevanceWeightListener
        tags:
            - { name: kernel.event_listener, event: oro_search.prepare_entity_map, method: onPrepareEntityMap }

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:search:reindex 'Oro\Bundle\OrganizationBundle\Entity\BusinessUnit' --env=prod command.