Re: [xwiki-devs] [Investigation] SOLR integration

On Fri, Sep 9, 2011 at 12:03 AM, Paul Libbrecht <paul(a)hoplahup.net> wrote: Thanks Paul for your emal. Well, this investigation was a starting point for understanding SOLR and how it could be possibly used to improve XWiki search features. I agree about the description of the application scenarios but I was counting on the community to help on this as well :) I just wrote in the document something interesting I found (I never used SOLR before and I am discovering it now :)) AFAIU the EmbeddedSolrServer is equivalent to the web application. The problem is that using the EmbeddedSolrServer is easier from an integration point of view (it's just a matter of declaring some dependencies in the pom.xml) while using a WAR version would mean to "merge" SOLR web application with the XWiki one which could be a more difficult task. So the first investigation focused on the EmbeddedSolrServer. This, however, doesn't prevent to use an external SOLR server on some deployment : SolrServer server = getSolrServer(); public SolrServer getSolrServer(){ if(some options are specified in the xwiki.cfg) return new CommonsHttpSolrServer(); else return new EmbeddedSolrServer(); } The SolrJ APIs are the same for the two components so it's just a matter of choosing the right implementation. Yes, I looked at it. The solrconfig.xml allows you to tune a lot of details. My first idea was: "let's see what we can do with a minimal solrconfig.xml, the one that could end up packaged with a standard XE distribution if we decide to bundle solr" It's clear that, given the power of SOLR, we will need at some point to provide the user/administrator the mechanisms to tune the configuration of SOLR (for example. a French site might be interested in using a different type of analysers, tokenizer, etc. for the analysis) Though I think that it should be done in a way that the user interface stays the same. This could be done in the component logic. Yep. If you store everything you will duplicate your XWiki database :) The schema.xml is a delicate point because once it's decided it should be freezed because the fields declared will then be used by other component via the API to retrieve the returned information. I've found interesting the fact that you can declare dynamic fields which are associated to a given type using a prefix/suffix. This could be used as a way to extending the schema at runtime if an application needs to. UI is another tricky point. I am thinking about a "standard distribution", that is, how a UI leveraging SOLR as a search engine should appear if SOLR is integrated in XWiki by default. So basically the basic scenario is: everything in the UI stays the same and we just change the engine under the hood. However the fact that SOLR has a lot of interesting features (e.g., facets) might drive the *standard* search UI towards some improvements. For example, as you suggested, spaces and authors could be interesting facets, but I would say also dates. This is an open discussion. customize the UI in order to take into account particular search scenarios. This would be great but I have no idea, at this point, about how to do it, and if it's really interesting in adding this flexibility in the standard distribution. Afterall if your scenario is that particular you can always write an application that uses a custom solrconfig.xml and schema and UI :) I see where you are heading :) Well, this investigation was more modest. As I said, it was just to try to understand if/how we could use SOLR as the default search infrastructure for the default XWiki distribution. It's clear that indexing/searching should be tuned with respect to the domain. It would be good to make the integration so flexible that these tuning could be taken into account. Though for a first iteration I think that would be too much :) Well, you your mail has been very very useful. Thanks, Fabio