Posted by bendygirl on September 29, 2011 at 7:00pm
I ran across a question about integrating Solr, Alfresco and Drupal and can't seem to find any discussion from anyone who may have done this.
So, can't think of a better place to ask the question.
Has anyone done it? And if so, how'd it go? Easy integration and configuration? Pit falls to be aware of? Any lessons learned?
Comments
Probably not...
Since Alfresco didn't integrate with Solr before 4.0 (which only recently came out), I really doubt anyone accomplished this in a way that would be easily replicable. Now that there's Solr support I think things will be much easier, but I'm guessing that it will still require a lot of custom work to make it work well (esp. because this is a brand new feature for Alfresco, and I'm not sure how much support they'd be willing to give you to help integrate with it).
Also, I'm assuming you'd want a full text search on your Alfresco docs, so you'd also need to use Tika as well to handle the data extraction. (See: http://wiki.apache.org/solr/ExtractingRequestHandler )
Alex Urevick-Ackelsberg
ZivTech: Illuminating Technology
It has been done, but it is custom
Solr has been integrated with Alfresco by a number of our clients. In these situations, Solr is an external search appliance which sits on top of Alfresco as an additional index to the Lucene one already in the product. I don't know the details, but it doesn't require fiddling with Tika (which Alfresco already uses under the hood). Rather you configure Solr to access the indexes that Alfresco is already creating.
With the new 4.0 release of Alfresco (out today!), we are using Solr as the product's internal index instead of Lucene (to complicate matters, Solr continues to use Lucene under its covers). This does not significantly change the manner in which Solr can sit on top of Alfresco as an external appliance, but it adds the capability of configuring the product to export its indexes to an external Solr instance in a cleaner manner. In the long term, we plan on leveraging the advanced capabilities of Solr to allow even closer integration.
Alfresco support will only be trained to help with exporting indexes to the version and configuration of Solr that we ship, but in theory it should be possible to take advantage of other Solr configurations.