I am offloading my search feature on a relational database to Azure Search. My Products tables contains columns like serialNumber, PartNumber etc.. (there can be multiple serialNumbers with the same partNumber).
I want to create a suggestor that can autocomplete partNumbers. But in my scenario I am getting a lot of duplicates in the suggestions because the partNumber match was found in multiple entries.
How can I solve this problem ?
The Suggest API suggests documents, not queries. If you repeat the partNumber information for each serialNumber in your index and then suggest based on partNumber, you will get a result for each matching document. You can see this more clearly by including the key field in the $select parameter. Azure Search will eliminate duplicates within the same document, but not across documents. You will have to do that on the client side, or build a secondary index of partNumbers just for suggestions.
See this forum thread for a more in-depth discussion.
Also, feel free to vote on this UserVoice item to help us prioritize improvements to Suggestions.