I have an application that is based heavily around a users ability to search.
A user can search for 1 or many entities, which includes: Businesses, People or an Animals.
For each of our result sets we want to have filters and sorting. This is where I am having some concern. My concern is that the "business" is pushing to have filter and sorting options that would filter/sort on content that is not visible in the search result. The content is not visible because we have tried to simplify and standardize our result sets.
My argument is that if the data is not visible the sort/filters become confusing because you can not see the sort data.
I.E You can sort by province/state, only if the province/state is in the result set.
Their argument is that they should have the options to filter/limit the result sets to whatever they want.
I.E. Regardless of whether or not province/state is in the result set, they feel they should have the ability to sort/filter on it.
What are you thoughts?
How coupled should the filter/sort criteria be with the available data?