Thanks so much Erick (and Stefan). Yes, I did some reading on SolrJ and Tika and you are spot-on. We will write our own importer using SolrJ and then we can grab the DB records and parse any attachments along the way.
Now it comes down to a schema design question. The issue I'm struggling with is what kind of field or fields to use for the attachments. The reason for the difficulty is that the documents we're most interested in are the DB records, not the attachments, and there could be 0 or 3 or 50 attachments for a single DB record. Should we: (1) Just add fields called "attachment_0", "attachment_1", ... , "attachment_100" to the schema? (2) Somehow index all attachments to a single field? (Is this even possible?) (3) Use dynamic fields? (4) None of the above? The idea is that if there is a hit in one of the attachments, then we need to show a link to the DB record. It would be nice to show a link the the document as well, but that's less important. cheers, Travis On Mon, Jul 25, 2011 at 9:49 AM, Erick Erickson <erickerick...@gmail.com>wrote: > I'd seriously consider going with SolrJ as your indexing strategy, it > allows > you to do anything you need to do in Java code. You can call the Tika > library yourself on the files pointed to by your rows as you see fit, > indexing > them as you choose, perhaps one Solr doc per attachment, perhaps one > per row, whatever. > > Best > Erick > > On Wed, Jul 20, 2011 at 3:27 PM, <tra...@dawnstar.com> wrote: > > > > [Apologies if this is a duplicate -- I have sent several messages from my > work email and they just vanish, so I subscribed with my personal email] > > > > Greetings. I am struggling to design a schema and a data import/update > strategy for some semi-complicated data. I would appreciate any input. > > > > What we have is a bunch of database records that may or may not have > files attached. Sometimes no files, sometimes 50. > > > > The requirement is to index the database records AND the documents, and > the search results would be just links to the database records. > > > > I'd love to crawl the site with Nutch and be done with it, but we have a > complicated search form with various codes and attributes for the database > records, so we need a detailed schema that will loosely correspond to boxes > on the search form. I don't think we could easily do that if we just crawl > the site. But with a detailed schema, I'm having trouble understanding how > we could import and index from the database, and also index the related > files, and have the same schema being populated, especially with the number > of related documents being variable (maybe index them all to one field?). > > > > We have a lot of flexibility on how we can build this, so I'm open to > any suggestions or pointers for further reading. I've spent a fair amount > of time on the wiki but I didn't see anything that seemed directly > relevant. > > > > An additional difficulty, that I am willing to overlook for the first > cut, is that some of these files are zipped, and some of the zip files may > contain other zip files, to maybe 3 or 4 levels deep. > > > > Help, please? > > > > cheers, > > > > Travis > -- ** *Travis Low, Director of Development* ** <t...@4centurion.com>* * *Centurion Research Solutions, LLC* *14048 ParkEast Circle *•* Suite 100 *•* Chantilly, VA 20151* *703-956-6276 *•* 703-378-4474 (fax)* *http://www.centurionresearch.com* <http://www.centurionresearch.com> **The information contained in this email message is confidential and protected from disclosure. If you are not the intended recipient, any use or dissemination of this communication, including attachments, is strictly prohibited. If you received this email message in error, please delete it and immediately notify the sender. This email message and any attachments have been scanned and are believed to be free of malicious software and defects that might affect any computer system in which they are received and opened. No responsibility is accepted by Centurion Research Solutions, LLC for any loss or damage arising from the content of this email.
