Question

I’m trying to implement a kind of hotel/hostel search using SolR and PHP. For any room available I store a new document inside my index containing relevant information about the accomodation and multivalued attributes containing an availableFrom and availableTill date. Running a query against SolR to get all rooms within a certain timespan shouldn’t be that hard, but my brain screws up when it comes to sorting…

My goal is to show not only the available accomodations, but all of them matching a general filter query on the destination (country/city/district) and sort these results so that all available rooms are sorted to the start of the list.

So for a search for rooms in Munich from 1st December ’12 till 5th December, I would like to get results like these:

• Room A (available)
• Room B (available)
• Room C (not completly available in the given period => nice to have)
• Room D (not available at all)

Currently I’m running SolR 3.6 but could switch to the new 4.0 if necessary.

Has any Solr-Guru out there some suggestions for me?
Any help appreciated 🙂

-edit-

I think Samuele pushed me in the right direction. So the question is now, how to create a function query to be able to sort by availability. Maybe there is a better way to store my document, i.e. change my schema.xml?

Here is a litte excerpt from it:

<field name="recordId" type="string" indexed="true" stored="true" />
<field name="language" type="int" indexed="true" stored="true" />
<field name="name" type="string" indexed="true" stored="false" />
<field name="maxPersons" type="int" indexed="true" stored="false" />
<field name="avgPrice" type="tdouble" indexed="true" stored="false" />
<field name="city" type="freetext" indexed="true" stored="false" />
<field name="district" type="freetext" indexed="true" stored="false" />
<field name="country" type="freetext" indexed="true" stored="false" />      
<field name="availableFrom" type="date" indexed="true" stored="true" multiValued="true" />
<field name="availableTill" type="date" indexed="true" stored="true" multiValued="true" />

Cheers – Sven

Answer 1

well, you have to boost your query based on the field “rooms” (or availability, depends on you) and give different scores based on the value

quick example:

let’s give an available room a boost of 20, a partial available a boost of 10 and not available a boost of 1 (just to be sure)

your query (url-wise, i don’t know the php interface to solr) would need something like

<query>&bq=rooms:avail^20.0&bq=rooms:part-avail^10.0...

suggestions: if you’re using dismax query handler, it’s addictive. this means you’ll have to add a bigger boost than that (2000 instead of 20 for example) since it adds the boosting value to the query score

also, you should check this link from the solr wiki, which is better than any explanation.