Distributed Search - multiple collections

Available since version 1.4.

With the distributed search feature one or more collection(s) that is/are different from the default one can be searched.

That enables the use cases for

  • Distributed search where a set of collection can be used for the same search

  • Different collections can be used for e.g. language/country versions while they all share the same search configuration.

Configuration

The collections that would be searchable have to be defined in the section collections of the search-layer-configurations.json`. Therefore a map that consists in the collection name and their properties is supplied. The properties for each collection are the following:

R = required

Name Type Description R

solrUrl

String

Full URL of the solr collection

✓

monitoringSolrUrl

String

Full URL of the solr monitoring collection (If empty the default one would be used)

analyticsSolrUrl

String

Url that points to the solr collection for analytics (If empty the default one would be used)

Configuration example

Take a look at the collections in our example configuration at http://search-features.demos.contexity.ch/sl/config. The example code below defines the collections wines and empty

Example configuration for two collections
{
  "collections": {
    "empty": {
      "solrUrl": "http://localhost:8035/solr/empty",
      "monitoringSolrUrl": "http://localhost:8035/solr/sem_monitoring_core_empty",
      "analyticsSolrUrl": "http://localhost:8035/solr/sem_monitoring_core_empty"
    },
    "wines": {
      "solrUrl": "http://localhost:8035/solr/winedemo",
      "monitoringSolrUrl": "http://localhost:8035/solr/sem_monitoring_core",
      "analyticsSolrUrl": "http://localhost:8035/solr/sem_monitoring_core"
    }
  }
}

Usage

The collection to be used for the search can be specified either

  • by using the parameter _collection

  • by accessing the collections specific endpoint(s):
    Specific endpoints for search, suggest, similar, etc. are available under {collectionname}/search, {collectionname}/suggest, {collectionname}/similar, etc.

Search multiple collections

In order to search over multiple collection the parameter _collection can be supplied with a comma-separated list of collections