Published February 9, 2015 by

How to Achieve Zero-Downtime Sitecore Deployments (Solr Search) – Part II

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A simple architecture was proposed in Part I of this article to avoid down times during the Sitecore content and code deployments. In this article, the deployments problems related to search is discussed and a potential solution is illustrated.

What search technology to use?

A straight forward answer is .. NOT Lucene. Although it’s the default search provider for Sitecore, it doesn’t do well within a multi-instances environment as the instances of the index will often go out-of-sync. Other search providers can be use such as Solr, Coveo for Sitecore and Elastic search. Each of these technologies may require different setup/configuration to achieve the goal of this article.

The rest of this article is based on Solr – as it’s currently the alternate search technology provided by Sitecore – showing what the potential problems are and how to avoid these problems.

 

What part of the search can cause downtime during deployments?

Two things can go wrong here:

1. Solr configuration updates

If you implemented a new feature in your website that requires a Solr configuration updates (e.g. auto complete using NGram or “Did you mean …” spellchecking) then you have to be very careful about they way of pushing the schema/config updates to the Solr server.

One mistake that developers do is restarting the Solr server to force it to read the new updates. Once the service is restarted, Sitecore will immediately show the yellow screen of death and the site will go down till the Solr server is up and running again.

Thankfully, Solr has a very helpful feature – Reload – that allows loading the config updates without causing downtime. Here is a quote from the Solr wiki pages describing the Reload function

Load a new core from the same configuration as an existing registered core. While the “new” core is initalizing, the “old” one will continue to accept requests. Once it has finished, all new request will go to the “new” core, and the “old” core will be unloaded.

  • http://localhost:8983/solr/admin/cores?action=RELOAD&core=core0

This can be useful when (backwards compatible) changes have been made to your solrconfig.xml or schema.xml files (e.g. new <field> declarations, changed default params for a <requestHandler>, etc…) and you want to start using them without stopping and restarting your whole Servlet Container.

You can also reload a Solr core using the admin portal by going to “Core Admin” -> Click on the core you want to reload -> Click the Reload button as shown in the following screenshot:

Solr Core Reload
Solr Core Reload

Read More How to Achieve Zero-Downtime Sitecore Deployments (Solr Search) – Part II

Scalability Session State Sitecore Solr

Published December 16, 2014 by

Sitecore Spatial Search using Solr

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Solr is a very powerful search provider that covers almost every feature that you would think of. Geographical search is one of the great features that Solr implemented really nicely by providing spatial indexes, query filters and sorting by distance. Unfortunately, the default Solr provider in Sitecore doesn’t utilise the spatial search feature in Solr. So, I’ve decided to build this small project to extend the existing provider. Thanks to @aokour86 (The author of the Sitecore spatial provider for Lucene) and to @herskinduk for their help and guidance.

Here is the installation guide and examples of how to use the extended provider.

Installation:

  1. Download the “Solr Search Support” package from the market place.
  2. Login to Sitecore (v 7.0+) and install the package via the “Installation Wizard”
  3. At the last step of the installation wizard, choose to restart the Sitecore server.
  4. Edit the /App_Config/Include/Sitecore.ContentSearch.Solr.Indexes.config to change the index type from
  5. Sitecore.ContentSearch.SolrProvider.SolrSearchIndex, Sitecore.ContentSearch.SolrProvider to Sitecore.ContentSearch.Spatial.Solr.Provider.SolrSearchIndexWithSpatial, Sitecore.ContentSearch.Spatial.Solr on the master, web and core indexes. E.g the web index should look like
    <index id="sitecore_web_index" type="Sitecore.ContentSearch.Spatial.Solr.Provider.SolrSearchIndexWithSpatial, Sitecore.ContentSearch.Spatial.Solr"> ...</index>
  6. Edit the Solr Schema.xml and add the following dynamic field
    <dynamicField name="*_rpt" type="location_rpt" indexed="true" stored="true" />

Read More Sitecore Spatial Search using Solr

Sitecore Solr

Marketplace Module Provider Sitecore Solr

Awesome Cars Demo Site
Published November 24, 2014 by

Awesome Cars Demo Site

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Here is the source code of the awesome cars demo site I presented at the Sitecore User Group (Cardiff) on 24/11/2014. This site illustrates how to use Sitecore and Solr…

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Sitecore Solr

Published October 30, 2014 by

Sitecore 7 & Solr – Why SearchResultItem.Url is always null?

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One essential thing that you will need to do in almost every search implementation is linking each search result item to their full (details) pages. The Sitecore content search provider for Solr doesn’t index the item url by default, here are the steps you need to get it working:

The Sitecore.ContentSearch.SearchTypes.SearchResultsItem base class contains the following property:

[IndexField("urllink")]
public virtual string Url {get; set;}

Consider the following sample code to get the urls of items located under a specific parent:

...
using(var context = index.CreateSearchContext())
{
  var query = context.GetQueryable<SearchResultItem>();
  var pageUrls = query.Where(i => i.Parent == new ID("<ParentItemIdHere>"))
                      .GetResults().Hits.Select(h => h.Document.Url).ToList();
}

Read More Sitecore 7 & Solr – Why SearchResultItem.Url is always null?

Sitecore Solr

Published August 5, 2014 by

Sitecore 7 & Solr – Multi term search

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The Solr search provider in Sitecore 7 works quite well if the search query contains a single term. However, if the search query contains multiple terms, you will need to tweak your code a little bit to get the expected results.

The following codes performs a search using a query that contains a single term.

 var indexName = "sitecore_web_index";
 var index = ContentSearchManager.GetIndex(indexName);
 using (var context = index.CreateSearchContext())
 {
 var query = "paint";
 var dataQuery = context.GetQueryable()
 .Where(i => i.Title == query);
 var results = dataQuery.GetResults().Hits.Select(h => h.Document);
 }

The Sitecore search provider generates the following Solr query:

title_t:(paint)

However, if you replace the

var query = "paint";

With

var query = "purple paint";

The generated Solr query will be:

title_t:("purple paint")

If the search query contains whitespace characters, the search provider will automatically wrap the query terms in double quotes. This will cause Solr to skip the query analysers – such as tokenization and stemming. So, it will only return results containing the string “purple paint” in the title, and will fail to match titles such as “purple-paint”, or “purple and red paint” and so on.

In order to work around the whitespace problem, you can implement one of the following solutions:

Read More Sitecore 7 & Solr – Multi term search

Sitecore Solr

Published June 28, 2014 by

Sitecore 7 & Solr – Search Context Extension Methods to Implement “Did you mean …?” Spellcheck

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One great way to improve the search experience on a website is to suggest alternate/corrected queries if the original ones were misspelled, similar to the “Did you mean …” provided by Google. If you are interested to implement this feature, I’ve some good news and some bad news for you. The good news is, this feature can be effortlessly implmeneted using the Solr Spellcheck search component. The bad news is, unfortunately the Spellcheck search component is not supported yet by the Sitecore 7/Solr search provider.

This article will show you an easy way to extend the search provider – using extension methods – to implement the Spellcheck feature. Two main steps are needed here; configure Solr to enable the Spellcheck component, and write the extension methods.

1. Enabling the Spellchecker in Solr

Edit your solrconfig.xml and locate the following element:

<searchComponent name="spellcheck" class="solr.SpellCheckComponent">

Under the searchComponent element, configure the field that will be used for building the suggested search queries. It should look like:

<str name="field">title_t</str>

Read More Sitecore 7 & Solr – Search Context Extension Methods to Implement “Did you mean …?” Spellcheck

Sitecore Solr

Search Sitecore Solr Spellcheck

Published June 4, 2014 by

Sitecore 7 & Solr – Sorting Search Results by Score

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The Solr search provider in Sitecore 7 allows users to rank the search results using different types of boosting methods. This article shows how to use the Query-Time Boosting to sort the search results and highlights the common mistakes that developers should avoid.

Assume that you want to run a search query over a set of Sitecore items, each of which has a title and description fields, and you would like the score of the results that contain the search keyword in the title to be higher than the ones contain the search keyword in the description.

The search query that uses Query-Time Boosting should look like:

var query = "guitar";
var dataQuery = context.GetQueryable<SearchResultItem>()
.Where(i => i.Title == query.Boost(3.0f) || i.Description == query.Boost(1.0f))

 

Read More Sitecore 7 & Solr – Sorting Search Results by Score

Sitecore Solr

Search Sitecore Solr

Published May 1, 2014 by

Sitecore 7 & Solr search auto-complete using NGram

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If you are about to implement an auto-compelte text box for your search page, then you are in the right place. This article will show you how to display search suggestions using Sitecore 7 and Solr Search Provider. Solr is a very powerful search platform which provides many indexing and query time analyzers. The NGram analyzer is used here to implement search auto-complete feature. Before I go through the details, please don’t do the following:

Don’t use String.Contains()

var context = index.CreateSearchContext();
var results = context.GetQueryable().Where(i=> i.Title.Contains(searchText));
...

Please don’t ever do this, your client will come back complaining that, when their customers search for “pen” they get irrelevant suggestions such as “Dispenser”, “Open” and “Sharpener”.

Don’t use String.StartsWith()

var context = index.CreateSearchContext();
var results = context.GetQueryable().Where(i=> i.Title.StartsWith(searchText));
...

This won’t work as well because it will fail to return results such as “blue pen” where the title doesn’t start with the word “pen”.

The proper way (Using NGram)

These are the steps to properly implement this feature:
Read More Sitecore 7 & Solr search auto-complete using NGram

Sitecore Solr

Search Sitecore Solr