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SOLR Search Integration

Version 13.1 by savis on 2012/05/25 04:09
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Project Description

 The idea of the project is to use Apache SOLR as the search engine for XWiki. XWiki is using Lucene as a core component for Wiki Search. Lucene is little hard to configure and doesn't support features like facet search, hit highlighting, customizing search relevancy using boost index out of the box. Solr stands out in its minimal configuration to implement the search engine.Few libraries and a couple of XML configuration files are sufficient to implement a well to do engine. Configuring multiple languages is easy in SOLR compared to Lucene.
          
Using SOLR, one can customize the indexing process by using required analyzers with selected tokenizers and set of filters on the dataset to generate highly customizable relevancy index. Through the front end, the user can select or configure the fields to be searched for and their weight which contributes to the document score. The SOLR component offers flexibility in the following ways.

  • Based on SOLR's schema and complementary information, the indexing process is customizable to only index and store as little information as needed. 
  • Through code customizability (exploiting the possibility of Groovy code in pages), the transformation of a user-query to a SOLR query should be
       adjustable, far beyond the simple text-parsing (enabling, for example, the prohibition of some spaces, or the conversion to multiple fields based on input
       parameters).
  • This component supports calibrating the search engine's parameter (such as the Dismax' parser coefficients, the analyzers usefulness, ...)
       by classical quantitative methods such as precision-and-recall, which any wiki master, or a collaborator, should be able to exploit and report.

Approach

 XWiki-platform-search module is split into api and solr implementation. We can have a single Wiki Search API exposed to xwiki and have multiple components with different implementations of SOLR like Embedded Solr server, a remote solr server hosted on a different source, indexing and querying the database instead of XWiki document objects.. etc..

Tentative Project Architecture

http://dl.dropbox.com/u/2027256/XWikiApplication%281%29.png
 http://dl.dropbox.com/u/2027256/XWikiApplication.png

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Solr APIs

The following are the APIs proposed for Solr which can be used by any one of the XWiki's scripting language. The design of the APIs are aimed to be generic enough that the backend could be lucene or solr.

getBackend

public String getBackend()

Returns:

Returns the name of the backend which is currently in use. It could be Lucene or Solr. 

rebuildIndex

public int rebuildIndex(com.xpn.xwiki.api.XWiki wiki, com.xpn.xwiki.api.Context context)

Starts the rebuild of the whole index

Parameters:

wiki -

context -

Returns:

Number of documents scheduled for indexing. -1 in case of errors

getSearchResults

public searchResponse getSearchResults(java.lang.String query,

                                                                java.lang.String languages,

                                                                java.lang.String searchType,

                                                                com.xpn.xwiki.api.XWiki wiki)

Searches the configured Indexes using the specified query for documents in the given languages. 

With virtual wikis enabled in your xwiki installation this will deliver results from all virtuall wikis.

Parameters : 

query - query string given by the user

languages - comma separated list of language codes to search in, may be null to search all languages. Language codes can be:

  • default for content having no specific language information
  • lower case 2- letter language codes like en, es , fr.

searchType - the type of search given by the user like facet, highlight or default.

Returns:

a searchResponse instance containing the results (i.e) the response objects.

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