Schemas and Configs in Solr

Solr has very extensive documentation and highly configurable. But for the purposes of getting started and keeping things simple, I am going to mention some important parts.

Solr can be operated with schema or schemaless. I personally would prefer proper schema. Solr allows storing values, skipping storage and just indexing or just storing without indexing. Similarly required or not, multi-valued, unique key etc…

Continuing from the previous blog posts of Getting started:

Getting started with Solr on Windows

Getting started with Solr on Linux!

First create a core by navigating to the solr directory and executing:

> solr.cmd create -c <NAME_OF_CORE>
// Example for creating a core known as "sample"
> solr.cmd create -c sample

Now navigate to <solr directory>\server\solr. Here you will find the sample directory. Inside sample directory, there would be a conf directory. The conf directory has the schema.xml and solrconfig.xml.

Now let’s delve into some Schema.xml:

The most important part is defining the schema, the copyField’s.

Let’s assume our schema requires a unique id, title, description and tags.

id is going to be a unique field, we want title, description and tags to be indexed. Same object can have multiple tags, so tags would be multi-valued.

We would add the following:

<field name="Title" type="text_general" indexed="true" stored="true"/>
<field name="Description" type="text_general" indexed="true" stored="true"/>
<field name="Tags" type="text_general" multiValued="true" indexed="true" stored="true"/>



<field name="id" type="string" multiValued="false" indexed="true" required="true" stored="true"/>

The “id” field would exist, we don’t want to add another “id” field, verify the syntax matches. Now we want to copy the values from Title, Description, Tags into _text_ and want _text_ to be indexed. Some people would try to copy * into _text_ as in all the fields. But in some schemas there may be meta information such as dates etc… So specifying which particular fields need to be copied would help. The next code block shows the copyfields.

<copyField source="Title" dest="_text_" />
<copyField source="Description" dest="_text_" />
<copyField source="Tags" dest="_text_" />

Now let’s delve into solrconfig.xml:

Search for <requestHandler name=”/select” class=”solr.SearchHandler”>

Inside this tag we can specify default page size, default field to index, any default facets etc. Let’s assume we want to set default page size of 10, default field to search of _text_ and faceting on Tags.

<requestHandler name="/select" class="solr.SearchHandler">
    <lst name="defaults">
      <str name="echoParams">explicit</str>
      <int name="rows">10</int>
      <str name="df">_text_</str>

      <str name="facet">on</str>
      <str name="facet.field">Tags</str>
    </lst>
  </requestHandler>

If config or schema changes, the core needs to be reloaded.

More Solr related Articles:

Schemas and Configs in Solr

Getting started with Solr on Windows

Getting started with Solr on Linux!

Hoping this blog post helps someone.