Several months ago, during one of the projects I have tried to construct a query with optimal faceting. The problem was that we need filters (fq) in the query but in the same time we need a faceting that was not filtered. To some point it was not possible in Solr – you had to make two queries. But now, you can do it with one query. Let’s meet LocalParams.
Solr
Solr and Tika integration (part 1 – basics)
Indexing the so-called “rich documents”, ie files like pdf, doc, rtf, and so on (or binary files) always required some additional work on the developer side, at least to get the contents of the file and prepare it in a format understood by the search engines, in this case for Solr. To minimize this job I decided to look at the Apache Tika and integration of this library with Solr.
“Car sale application” – Spatial Search, adding location data (part 3)
The amount of announcements in our database is so large, that our web site users started to look for another option to filter search results and another way of sorting them. We need to add the functionality, which allows us to operate with localization data related to the cars.
Data Import Handler & XML – nested entities
Data Import Handler is a very nice and powerful tool. The following entry is a description of the problem (and solutions) which I met recently.
Sorting by function value in Solr (SOLR-1297)
In Solr 3.1 and later we have a very interesting functionality, which enables us to sort by function value. What that gives us ? Actually a few interesting possibilities.
Waiting for 4.0: SOLR-2272 – Solr and JOIN functionality
Index – delete or update?
From time to time, in working with Solr there is a problem – how to update Solr index structure. There are various reasons for these changes – the new functional requirements, optimization, or anything else – it is not important. What is important is the question that arise – should we remove the index, or simply change the structure and do a full indexing? Contrary to appearances, the answer to this question depends on the changes we made in the structure of the index.
”Car sale” application – WordDelimiterFilter and PatternReplaceFilter, helping to improve search results (part 2)
In the first part of our ”Car sale” application related posts we created some standard index structure by properly configuring schema.xml configuration file. It didn’t take long to hear the first complains from the website users with this kind of configuration. Why don’t I receive any search results entering the “audi a” phrase ? I would like to see some announcements with “Audi A6” and “Audi A8” for example. I entered the phrase “Honda crv” – 0 results, “Suzuki maruti” – none. Are there no related offers in the announcement database ? There are! But the current configuration of the searchable field type (field “content” – type “text”) does not allow us to find those offers using the queries we’ve entered. That’s the reason why the WordDelimiterFilter and PatternReplaceFilter need to enter the battlefield.
Optimization – filter cache
Today’s entry is dedicated to one type of cache in the Solr – filter cache. I will try to explain what it does, how to configure it and how to use it in an efficient way.
“Car sale application” – schema.xml designing to gain what we really need (part 1)
One of the fundamental solr’s configuration file is the schema.xml file. It is a kind of connector between what we need and what solr understands. If we want to have a search engine, that gives us search results we really expect, then it is very important to properly design the schema.xml configuration file.
We would like to introduce you the first of the series of articles which will hopefully show us how to design schema.xml file and how to handle and modify all of the file’s components.