Question

I am building a search engine, and have a not so unique ID for a lot of different names… So, for example, there could be an id of B0051QVF7A which would have multiple names like “Kindle” “Amazon Kindle” “Amazon Kindle 3G” “Kindle Ebook Reader” “New Kindle” etc.

The problem, and question i have, is that i am trying to enter this data from a DB of 11 ish million rows. each is being read one at a time. So i dont have all the names of each ID. I am adding new documents to the list each time.

What i am trying to find out is how do i add names to an existing Document? if i am reading documentation correctly, it seems to overwrite the whole document, not add extra info to the field… i just want to add an extra name to the document multivalue field…

I know this could cause some weird and wonderful “issues” if a name is removed (in the example above, “New Kindle” could be removed when a newer Kindle gets released) but i am thinking of recreating the index every now and again, to clear out issues like that (once a month or so. Its taking about 45min currently to create the index).

So, how do you add a value to a multivalue field in solr for an existing document?

Answer 1

Since according to the question linked to by @Mauricio Scheffer’s comment… Solr does not currently support updating a single field value in an existing document. I see that there might be a couple of options here…

1. In your process that is pulling data from the database, when it finds a new name, it will need to pull all fields for the existing document from Solr, add the new value and resend the complete document to Solr (you may already be doing this).
2. Add some additional logic to your code that reads from the database, to gather all of the unique names for each document prior to inserting documents into the index. However, given that you have ~11 million records, there could be a resource constraint that would prevent this from being feasible.