How to determine field-type for SOLR indexing?

Question

I have two table fields in a MySQL table. One is VARCHAR and is a \"headline\" for a classified (classifieds website). The other is TEXT field which contains the \"text\" fo

Answer 1

1. Schema

Your Solr schema is very much determined by your intended search behavior. In your schema.xml file, you'll see a bunch of choices like "text" and "string". They behave differently.

The string field type is a literal string match. It would operate like == in a SQL statement.

The text_ws field type does tokenization. However, a big difference in the text field is the filters for stop-words and delimiters and lower-casing. Notice how these filters are designated for both the Lucene index and the Solr query. So when searching a text field, it will adapt the query terms using these filters to help find a match.

When indexing things like news stories, for example, you probably want to search for company names and headlines differently.

The above example would allow you to do a search like &coname:Intel&headline:processor+specifications and retrieve matches hitting exactly Intel stories.

If you wanted to search a range

2. Result Fields

You can defined a standard set of return fields in your RequestHandler

    
        category,coname,headline
    

You may also define the desired fields in your query string, using the fl parameter.:

/select?indent=on&version=2.2&q=coname%3AIn*&start=0&rows=10&fl=coname%2Cid&qt=standard

You can also select ranges in your query terms using the field:[x TO *] syntax. If you wanted to select certain ads by their date , you might build a query with

ad_date:[20100101 TO 20100201]

in your query terms. (There are many ways to search ranges, I'm presenting a method that uses integers instead of Date class.)