Question

Sorry for the lengthy text, it’s a bit difficult to explain:

We are using Solr to index some user info like username, email (among other things).

I’m also trying to use facets for search, so for example, I added a multi-value field to user called “organizations” where I would store the name of the organizations that user work for.

So i can use that field for facetted search and be able to filter a user search query result by the organizations this user work for.

So now, the issue I have is my code does something like:
1) Add users documents to Solr
2) When a user is assigned an organization membership(role), update the user doc to set the organizations field

Now I have the following issue with step 2:
If I just do a addField(“organizations”, “BigCorp”) on the user doc, it will add that value regardless if organizations already have that value(“BigCorp”) or not, but I want each org name to appear only once.

So only way I found to get that behavior is to query the user document, get the values of “organization” and only add the new value if it’s not already in there – if !userDoc.getValues(“organiations”).contains(value) {… add the value to the doc and save it …}-

Now that works well, but only if I commit all the time(between step 1 & 2 at least), because the document query will not work unless it has been committed already. Obviously in theory its best not to commit all the time performance-wise, and unpractical since I process those inserts in batches.

So I guess the main issue would be:

• Is there a way to update a multi-value field, without allowing duplicates, that would not require querying the doc to manually prevent duplicates ?

• Maybe some better way to do this ?

Thanks.

Answer 1

Couple of things –

• For multiple duplicate values in the faceted field, the value in faceted field is counted just once. So even if you add multiple same values, that would be reflected as a single value in the facet count entry. Have tested this. you too can confirm.
• Also, when you reindex the document why would you need to check whats in the existing document. As I presume you would have the unique list of organizations and when fed to Solr, the document would be deleted and inserted.