Graphical Search Refiners for SharePoint

Here’s my proof of concept for graphical search refiners for SharePoint 2010. It is based on the Google chart tools API, specifically the treemap library: http://code.google.com/apis/chart/interactive/docs/gallery/treemap.html.

I simply override the XSL of the refiners web part so that the item counts for each refiners are used to display an area in the treemap proportional to the number of items found. There is no need to override the filter category definition xml to include counts (via the ShowCounts=”Count” attribute) as the XSL accesses the count values directly:

This is just a proof of concept so there are some (many) rough edges but if you want to grab the xsl I used it’s available here: RefinersXSL. Feel free to extend, enhance or use this as you wish.

Finally, you need to include a reference to the Google JavaScript API on your page somewhere:

<script type="text/javascript" src="https://www.google.com/jsapi"></script>

…perhaps via a content editor web part or via a delegate control.

Enjoy.