Using parsing update processors to parse data

Let's assume that we are running a bookstore, we want to sort our books by the publication date, and run faceting on the number of likes each book gets. However, we get all our data in XML, and we don't have data in the proper format, and so on. The good thing is that we can tell Solr to parse our data property so that we don't have to change what we already have. This recipe will show you how to do this.

Getting ready

Before continuing with this recipe, I suggest reading the Counting the number of fields recipe of this chapter to get used to updating the request processor configuration.

How to do it...

Let's look at the steps we need to take to make data parsing work.

1. First, we need to prepare our index structure, so we add the following section to the schema.xml file:

   <field name="id" type="string" indexed="true" stored="true" required="true" />
   <field name="title" type="text_general" indexed="true" stored="true" />
   <field name="published...