Using Trilion 2011 SOLR for GUI Extensions

Question

I didn’t get into the details of what and how the SDL Tridion stores the data in it by the internal search engine (SOLR), but I need to create a GUI extension that should search for component / metadata fields in publications.

I see no reason not to look into SOLR, but before I put the time in, does anyone know why this would be a bad idea?

Thanks in advance!

Answer 1

It really depends on your search requirements. If this is just a simple search, then this is probably good, but if you want to do some Tridion searches, then it will be quite difficult, since the SDL Tridion does a lot of post-processing on SOLR results. Why can't you use CoreService and have a convenient supported search interface?

Answer 2

It is a bad idea to bypass the API altogether and directly query SOLR. From your question, I see no reason for this.

Need to index more data than what Tridion has already indexed? If not, can you just search using the API?

If you do, you might consider introducing a special search indexing handler for additional data. Although this is not well documented at the moment, the creation seems quite simple (implementing ISearchIndexingHandler and updating the configuration of CM and SOLR). The benefit will be that your data can also be found using the standard Tridion search.

Answer 3

As Peter said, its a really bad idea to interact with the SOLR that ships with Tridion. Tridion has an abstraction layer to hide the complexity of the SOLR query. For example, tridion hides sensitivity to the search date of a search keyword.

I highly recommend using tridion search api to create ur interface. Tridion search api also supports solr query execution directly. But this is not recommended.

To index additional data, you can implement ISearchIndexingHandler. It has some difficulty with solr configuration files (adding new fields).