Solr Integration and Enhancements
Solr has a lot of extensive features
Todd Hatcher
What is Solr?
 Solr offers advanced, optimized, scalable searching
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capabilities
Communicate with Solr using XML, JSON and HTTP
Includes a HTML admin interface
Solr is built on top of Lucene
Rich features of Lucene can be leveraged when using Solr
Solr is very configurable
Integration with ColdFusion
 Very little direct integration with ColdFusion
 ColdFusion communicates with Solr using HTTP
 Solr runs in its own JVM, does not share with ColdFusion
 Using ColdFusion installation, Solr runs in a jetty servlet
container on port 8983 (http://localhost:8983/solr)
 Solr is exposed in production by default
 Important files located C:\ColdFusion9\solr\multicore
 Solr offers a lot more than what is available using cfindex
cfcollection cfsearch
Solr
 What is a core? – it’s like a verity collection (a searchable
data group)
 Single Core (one index) vs Multicore (multiple isolated
configurations/schemas/indexes using same Solr instance)
 C:\ColdFusion9\solr\multicore\solr.xml is the central file
that points to locations of the Solr cores’ configuration and
data (this what CF administrator reads/writes to when
creating and using Solr collections)
 You can put your Solr cores under you project directory and
keep them in source control
[core]/conf/solrconfig.xml
 Main configuration for solr core
 <queryResponseWriter name=“json” /> determines the
format of the results. ColdFusion uses xslt by default
 You can return JSON, XML, python, ruby, php
 Multiple query response writers can be configured, one can
be set as default others can be specified by passing parameter
wt:[name] (eg. wt:json)
 cfsearch type of methods will not work if the response writer
is not what ColdFusion is expecting
[core]/conf/schema.xml
 Field Types maps custom types to the solr/lucene type
 type solr.TextField allows for analyzers
 Analyzers can be run at index time or query time
 They allow for manipulations of the data (typically filtering)
 The order in which filters are declared is the order processed
 StopFilterFactory removes common words that do not help
the search results
 WordDelimiterFilterFactory can adds words like WiFi, Wi, Fi
by splitting the original into subwords
[core]/conf/schema.xml cont.
 EnglishPorterFilterFactory determines root word using word
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variations like -ing determines root word and adds to index
SynonymFilterFactory treats words as same
DoubleMetaphoneFilterFactory for phonetic logic (better
than Soundex which Verity uses)
TextSpell/TextSpellPhrase feedback “did you mean”
<copyField source=“fieldName” dest=“d”/> dest fieldtype
can run different analyzers on source field and store result
wiki.apache.org/solr/AnalyzersTokenizersTokenFilters
Adobe adds quite a bit to the file to create fieldtypes to be
compatible with what was in verity
[core]/conf/schema.xml cont.
 Similar to creating a database table. Maps field names to
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types using <field />
Gives you the ability to store additional data
Field can be indexed (searchable)
Field can be stored (referenced and returned with results)
Field can be required
<uniqueKey>[field name]</uniqueKey>
<solrQueryParse defaultOperator=“OR” />
Indexing
 Data is sent using api - HTTP POST to Solr as
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XML/JSON/Binary
Commit is an intensive task. Do bulk adds first then call
commit
<cfindex /> calls commit after each index (confirmed?)
Commit after each would noticeably increase index time
Efficient Process : add data (queue), commit, optimize
Search Syntax
 field:term (*:* returns everything)
 A score is generated at query time, the value itself doesn’t
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have any meaning, the scores are relevant only when relative
to each other (a scale)
fq can filter query based on some supplied condition
wt is the return type of the results (xml,json, etc.)
qt is the request handler used to process the request (default
is “standard”)
fl is the list of fields to return (field must be stored)
q is the query string
You can specify the start value and maxrows
DisMaxRequestHandler
 Declared in solrconfig.xml
 Allows simplified searching without strict syntax
 Can be configured with default weighted parameters (which
can be overriden)
 Causes the q parameters to be parsed differently
Resources
 Lucene In Action
 http://wiki.apache.org/solr/
 http://cfadminsearcher.riaforge.org/
 http://cfsolrlib.riaforge.org/
 CF Solr Lib written by Shannon Hicks –Wrapper for Solr
functionality