Chapter 3. Indexing Data

In the previous chapter, we saw the various analyzers, tokenizers, and filters provided by Solr that help us select the most important data from a given document. In this chapter, we'll see how Solr provides us a way to index this data so that we can run queries on top of it. We'll cover the following topics in this chapter:

• Defining field types in Solr
• Creating a custom musicCatalogue example
• Facet searching

The Solr indexing process can mainly be broken down into two major parts:

• Converting the document from its native format to XML or JSON, both of which are supported by Solr
• Adding documents into Solr datastore using API or HTTP POST

To better understand the preceding two parts, we'll create an example of a music catalogue that contains metadata related to songs. The music catalogue will contain metadata related to a song that can later be used to retrieve important information regarding the song.

We'll also see how Solr provides various...