Question

I have a products table on my database, and a table with features of this products. The features table have 3 columns: id, type and value. Id is a foreign key from products.
A example of data on my tables:
Table Products:

ID | Description |

01 Computer A

02 Car

03 Computer B

Table Features:

ID | Type | Value |

01 Processor Phenom X3

01 Memory 2GB

01 HDD 500GB

02 Color Blue

02 Mark Ford

03 Processor Phenom X3

03 Memory 3GB

I want the best way to index it, so, a example, when someone searches for “computer”, the faceting shows:

Phenom X3(2)

Memory 2GB(1)

Memory 3GB(1)

HDD 500GB(1)

And so on, related with the query string. If I make a query with the string “processor”, it will list Phenom X3(1) only if this products (with “processor” on description) have a feature like Processor: Phenom X3. There’s a lot of product types, so we can’t create static colums to all features and pass it to Solr…
I hope my question is clear, thanks in advance!

Answer 1

Use data import handler to index the data @ http://wiki.apache.org/solr/DataImportHandler

You can define the products table as main entity and features as sub entity. So that the product with features is indexed as a single document.

For indexing –
Define description field as indexed true
As you want facet on type and value, you can define a new field type_value with type string and concat the type and value field in dataconfig.xml
type_value will be a multivalued field.

For searching –
Make the product description field searchable e.g. q=description:computers
You can configure this in the solrconfig.xml with proper weightage

Define the features field as a facet field and facet.field=type_value

I hope this gives a fair idea.