Using low search for custom field multiple select. A primer

Question

I have been looking at using potentially Low Search to perform the following:

Example: A site that users can research high end stereo equipment.

Required: Create a structure listing/channel for these with 2 custom multiple select fields for manufacturer and type.

Create a front end page with a two dropdowns - Manufacturer and Type. Needs the potential to add other custom fields of the same multiple select field types such as colour or price range.

As I only have a couple of EE sites under my belt and never used Low Search, I was after an initial push to see if this is possible with Low Search and if Low or someone could help with the template code to get me going.

TIA.

Answer 1

Using categories, like Stephen suggested, will be more accurate, as you'll be filtering by IDs instead of strings. The problem with searching directly into multiple-select fields, is that you might get issues with substring matches.

You can use search:my_custom_field fields for searching the multiple selects, and you could use Low Options to generate the list of options. You'd then get something like this:

<select name="search:my_custom_field[]" multiple="multiple">
  {exp:low_options:my_custom_field}
    {options}<option value="{option:value}">{option:label}</option>{/options}
  {/exp:low_options:my_custom_field}
</select>

This, by default, would be like setting a parameter search:my_custom_field="option1|option2" in the channel entries tag. You can change that to search:my_custom_field="option1&&option2" by adding require_all="search:my_custom_field" to the Form tag.

Answer 2

Yes, you can use Low Search for multiple select fields. However, for the way you're wanting to use dropdowns to create filters you'd be wiser to use categories with Low Search instead. Low Search has some solid documentation for searching categories.

Here's a site that I recently built using Low Search where all the filters are built from categories.