Hi Yonik and Upayavira, Thank you both for your insightful responses. We now have a much better understanding of how to implement distributed indexing, although no doubt more issues will emerge along the way.
Just to clarify (and for critique), our approach goes something like this: We will use a DistributedUpdateRequestHandler to process an update request when a 'shards' parameter is present in the URL (as with distributed search). For example http://localhost:8983/solr/collection1/update?shards=localhost:8983/solr,localhost:7574/solr will index the docs across both servers specified. Of course, as Yonik suggested, this could easily be extended (by using a different URL or additional params) to handle an entire cluster or a logical shard. The server would then use the information received from the request handler to add the documents to the index. To do this, a ShardPolicy/ShardDistributionPolicy would be consulted - as specified in the solrconfig.xml? (with a default method if none specified) - which would decide which shard to send that document to. Then the documents would actually be forwarded on to their respective shards to be indexed. We'll be sure to keep the mailing list posted on our progress. Thanks, Alex
