Possible to send empty parameter ("") to filter?

Open Q&A
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#1

Hi all,

I’m using Algolia on the no-code platform Bubble and I’m running into an issue when using Filters.

I have Attributes for faceting set up with 2 Attributes: ‘Manufacturer’ and ‘Price’.

When I pass parameters for both filters it works as expected (looking for all products from Mfr_1 <$5000):
Manufacturer: "Mfr_1" AND Price < 5000

However when I pass an Empty parameter (see products from any Manufacturer with a price < $5000) it doesn’t work:
Manufacturer: "" AND Price < 5000

I presume this is because Algolia is trying to find products that don’t have a Manufacturer and they don’t exist (every product has a Manufacturer specified), hence returning 0 results.

Is it possible for Algolia to ignore empty parameters?

Side note: due to the constraints of Bubble, I can’t make the Filters dynamic (i.e removing the Manufacturer filter entirely if none are specified, such that I would just pass:
Price < 5000

#2

@andrewmccalister I didn’t find a way to do this, unfortunately. I looked through our docs and we don’t seem to have a way to wildcard match or ignore empty filters.

Too bad the facets cannot be dynamic in this integration, as that would completely solve the issue here. Do you have access to the underlying InstantSearch object in one of your scripts, or is it all hands-off? It’d be possible to trigger a manual refinement on the configuration widget and remove the extra filter this way, but it’d be a hack-around for sure.

Happy to help further, let us know! Thanks!