Note: I'm having a hard time explaining this, so please ask questions and I'll try to refine the problem as much as possible.
Assuming I have the following category structure:
- Planets - Earth - Mars
And the following items/categories (nevermind that some of them don't logically make sense):
- Item #1 - Category: Planet - Category: Earth - Item #2 - Category: Planet - Item #3 - Category: Earth
If I set up a search on 'Item', the category counts I get returned would be:
- Planet (2) - Earth (2)
However, since Earth is a child of Planet, I would want to display something more akin to
- Planet (3) - Earth (2)
Where clicking on Planet would return all 3 results (the 2 results with 'Planet' explicitly specified and the 1 result whose category is a child of 'Planet').
Is there an efficient pattern for doing this?
If it helps, I'm using rails with the awesome_nested_set gem to manage my hierarchies and thinking_sphinx to do the searching (where categories are specified as facets).