Is there a way to match property or dimension has multiple values?

Question

I have Endeca records indexed from database. Each record will have:
ID, Name, CategoryID, CategoryName.... Each record may belong to multiple category. So after reindex, the record looks like the following:
ID:0001
Name: Name 1
CategoryID:1
CategoryID:2
CategoryName: Cat Name 2
CategoryName: Cat Name 1
My question is "is there a way I can know categoryID:1 is matching categoryName: Cat Name 1, and categoryID:2 is matching categoryName: Cat Name 2"?

Answer 1

Hi,
There are a couple of ways to accomplish this that I've used. There may be others that I have not seen or considered.
First is to create records with this category information and use RRN to combine the two. However, RRN may have licensing issues.
So, you would have something like the book example:
BookName: Freakonomics
AuthorIds: 1, 2
RecordType: Book
AuthorId: 1
AuthorName: Stephen Dubner
RecordType: Author
AuthorId: 2
AuthorName: Steven Levitt
RecordType: Author
Then it's a standard RRN exercise to combine the books and authors at query time.
The second approach is to create what I call aggregated or complex properties where you combine the subfields that are associated.
Name: abc
Category_Combined: CatId1<DELIM>CatName1
Category_Combined: CatId2<DELIM>CatName2
Your app code would have to split out the Category_Combined property into the sub-fields for display.
Now, if you don't want to have CatId a searchable field, put a non-searchable character in front of it and configure it in your Search Characters. For example, choose some ASCII code that cannot be entered directly from a keyboard. Thus your property becomes:
Category_Combined: <FunkyChar>CatId1<DELIM>CatName1
This adds complexity to your pipeline code in that it has to create the concatenated fields and on your app code for searching, splitting, etc. But it works.
-Tim