Hierarchical Category Facets Now Show the Largest Categories First

The hierarchical category facet on hosted search pages listed its first fifty values alphabetically instead of by size. Every level of the hierarchy is now sorted by document count, so the drill-down opens with the categories that hold the most content.

01 What you saw

A facet configured as a hierarchy asks Solr for a pivot across the category levels. The page-wide sort order for facets is alphabetical, because the language and locale lists read best that way, and the pivot inherited it. Alphabetically, the first fifty values on a news site are article headlines that begin with digits: fifty entries, one document each, no sub-categories, while News, Sports and Weather never made the list.

02 What changed

• Every level of a hierarchical facet is sorted by count. The top level opens with the biggest categories, and each drill-down step does the same.
• Language and locale facets keep their alphabetical order. The change is scoped to the hierarchy fields only.
• Nothing to configure. Any index with a Hierarchical widget in Facet Filter Mapping gets it on the next search.