Coveo Facet Field Indexing Issue

Question

We are using the Sitecore 8.1, and I have patched a field called categories in the coveo default Index configuration node to make it a facet.

 <configuration xmlns:patch="http://www.sitecore.net/xmlconfig/">
  <sitecore>
<coveo>
  <defaultIndexConfiguration type="Coveo.AbstractLayer.CoveoDefaultIndexConfiguration, Coveo.AbstractLayer">
    <fieldMap type="Coveo.SearchProvider.CoveoFieldMap, Coveo.SearchProvider">
      <fieldNames hint="raw:AddFieldByFieldName">
        <fieldType patch:before="fieldType[@fieldName='alltemplates']" fieldName="categories" isFacet="true" isExternal="true" isMultiValue="true" settingType="Coveo.Framework.Configuration.FieldConfiguration, Coveo.Framework" />
      </fieldNames>
    </fieldMap>
    </defaultIndexConfiguration>
    </coveo>
  </sitecore>
</configuration>    

After reindexing the web index, I see the categories as facet field on the CES server, and we were able to query it as facet field.

Randomly, this setting is lost on the index server, and it is no more a facet field.

All we have to do is to re-index the web index to make it as a facet field again. Can anyone tell me if I am missing some other configuration in sitecore ?

Answer 1

You do not need to manually patch the config file to make a field facet, you can instead declare them in the facet/bucket folder of the Content Editor like you would do with Lucene: https://developers.coveo.com/display/SitecoreV4/Making+a+Sitecore+Field+Facettable

Then you would need to re-index yes. If the field is "all of a sudden" no longer a facet, then maybe you have conflicting configuration files.

Make sure your CD share the same configuration file as your CM.

Cheers, Simon