The SitePoint PHP blog has continued their series showing the use of the PINQ library for PHP (a PHP implementation of the LINQ tool). In part one they introduced the tool and showed how to it could be used to query and sort data. In this second part they move on and show how to perform a multi-faceted search on data from a MySQL database.

We are not going to cover the full aspect of faceted search in this series. Interested parties can refer to relevant articles published on Sitepoint and other Internet publications. [...] Unfortunately, faceted search is not a built-in feature provided by MySQL yet. What can we do if we are using MySQL but also want to provide our users with such a feature? With PINQ, we’ll see there is an equally powerful and straightforward approach to achieving this as when we are using other DB engines – at least in a way.

Building from the code from the first part of the series, they create a few more simple routes that let you define the different facets to use for the searching/sorting. He creates a custom facet class that uses the "traversable" handling of the PINQ to do the data manipulation. He creates a few different facet objects, each creating a customized filter. finally, he ties it all back into the endpoint and includes the updated markup to show the results. He finishes up the post mentioning a few limitations and improvements that could be made on the example as well.