Best Way to Read A Nested Structure from Solr?

[Jennifer Coston <Je...@raytheon.com>]

Hello,

I am sure there have been many discussions on the best way to do this, but I am lost and need your advice. I have a nested Solr Document containing multiple levels of sub-documents. Here is a JSON example so you can see the full structure:

{
  "id": "Test Library",
  "description": "example of nested document",
  "content_type": "library",
  "authors": [{
      "id": "author1",
      "content_type": "author",
                  "name": "First Author",
      "books": {
                                "id": "book1",
                                "content_type": "book",
                                "title": "title of book 1"
                  },
                  "shortStories": {
                                "id": "shortStory1",
                                "content_type": "shortStory",
                                "title": "title of short story 1"
                  }
                  },
                  {
      "id": "author2",
      "content_type": "author",
                  "name": "Second Author",
      "books": {
                                "id": "book1",
                                "content_type": "book",
                                "title": "title of book 1"
                  },
                  "shortStories": {
                                "id": "shortStory1",
                                "content_type": "shortStory",
                                "title": "title of short story 1"
                  }
    }]
}

I want to query for a document and retrieve the nested structure. I tried using the ChildDocumentTranformerFactory but it flattened the result to be just Library and all other documents as children:

{
  "id": "Test Library",
  "description": "example of nested document",
  "content_type": "library",
  "_childDocuments_":[
                {"id": "author1",
      "content_type": "author",
                  "name": "First Author"
                },
                {"id": "book1",
                "content_type": "book",
                "title": "title of book 1"
                },
                {
                "id": "shortStory1",
                "content_type": "shortStory",
                "title": "title of short story 1"
                },
                {
     "id": "author2",
     "content_type": "author",
                "name": "Second Author"
                },
    {
                "id": "book1",
                "content_type": "book",
                "title": "title of book 1"
                },
                {
                "id": "shortStory1",
                "content_type": "shortStory",
                "title": "title of short story 1"
                }
   ]
}

Here are the query parameters I used:
q={!parent which='content_type:library'}
df=id
fl=*,[child parentFilter='content_type:library' childFilter='id:*']
wt=json
indent=true

What is the best way to read the nested structure from Solr? Do I need to do some sort of faceting?

Thank you,

Jennifer Coston

P.S. I am using Solr version 5.2.1