[Plugin: Relevanssi – A Better Search] Searching in posts that have BOTH CatA AND CatB (intersection

Yeah, that doesn’t work, because if you do that, $wp_query->query_vars[‘cat’] will only contain the first category. I don’t know how the default WP search makes it work, but from Relevanssi’s point of view, the second parameter just doesn’t exist.

https://www.example.com/?s=hello&cats=XX,YY

does work, where XX and YY are category ID numbers.

Since the extra categories don’t appear in the query_vars, there’s not much I can do to make that kind of syntax work.

@msaari:

Thank you for your prompt reply.

I tried the “cats=xx,yy” method, but this does not work because the goal is to find posts that exist in BOTH categories (XX && YY) at the same time, not all posts of category XX and all posts of category YY.

The default WordPress search allowed us to achieve this through this technique:

https://www.likno.com/blog/category/likno-web-accordion-builder+knowledge-base/?s=hello

Couldn’t relevanssi “respect” this *existing* feature of WordPress, through an addition to its code?

Thank you again.

Well, yes, that works in default WP search, but like I said, WordPress doesn’t pass the second category in query_vars, so I can’t access it in Relevanssi. WordPress doesn’t support respecting this technique.

I’ll see about adding the category intersection in the next version, it shouldn’t be too tricky.

OK, thanks for the reply.

I misunderstood what you told me in your previous post about WordPress not passing the parameters to your plugin.

It would be great if you can do this independently within your plugin in the next version, as mentioned by you.

I have also sent you a small donation by PayPal, mostly for your kindness to reply fast and consider this addition (while not obliged to do so).

Thanks.

This capability would be a huge help with an online bookstore I’m helping build, as well, to deal with all the possible genres a book can belong to.

Well, it is possible –?I just worked on a job search like that last weekend –?but it takes a different approach. If you have a way to pass multiple categories, you can then make Relevanssi return intersections or unions, whatever you want, by filtering the search results with the relevanssi_hits_filter filter hook.

Hi Mikko,

Any examples available from your assignment for this? I’m also trying to figure out a way to let Relevanssi know when I’m searching within two or more categories. I guess if ‘category__and’ is set, Relevanssi should automatically recognize that the search should include results that match every category specified in ‘category__and’ for WP_Query.

Like Goce noticed, Relevanssi doesn’t actually support category__and at the moment. It will do so, in the next version.

Also, much of the stuff earlier in the thread has been resolved by Relevanssi 3.1, which has support for WP_Query.