XJoin, a way to use external data sources with Solr

[Charlie Hull <ch...@flax.co.uk>]

Hi all,

We've recently built a patch that allows you to incorporate external 
data into Solr queries - this is for data that for some reason you can't 
index directly. My colleague has written a couple of blog posts 
illustrating how to use it in an e-commerce setting, hope you find them 
useful:
http://www.flax.co.uk/blog/2016/01/25/xjoin-solr-part-1-filtering-using-price-discount-data/
http://www.flax.co.uk/blog/2016/01/29/xjoin-solr-part-2-click-example/

We're very interested in other use cases - one that occurs to us is 
security filtering.

Cheers

Charlie
-- 
Charlie Hull
Flax - Open Source Enterprise Search

tel/fax: +44 (0)8700 118334
mobile:  +44 (0)7767 825828
web: www.flax.co.uk

Re: XJoin, a way to use external data sources with Solr

[Zisis Tachtsidis <zi...@runbox.com>]

Hi Tom,

Thanks for clarifying the purpose of XJoin, makes sense now. Hope it makes
it into Solr's main branch, this could prove useful! For the time being
PostFilter covers my needs. 



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Re: XJoin, a way to use external data sources with Solr

[TomW <to...@flax.co.uk>]

Hi Zisis,

I think I remember considering using a PostFilter, however, whilst that
seems to be fine for a simple filter, what we wanted to do with XJoin was,
as well as filtering, to pull in fields from the external data and
incorporate them into the matching documents in the SOLR results set.  Once
we'd done that, it was then fairly easy to extend this to allow boosting on
an external score (instead of a filter, or as well as) and other neat
features.

Hopefully that answers your questions, if not, fire away with some more!

Cheers,
Tom W (Flax)



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Re: XJoin, a way to use external data sources with Solr

[Zisis Tachtsidis <zi...@runbox.com>]

Hi Charlie, 

This looks like an interesting feature, but I have a couple of questions
before giving it a try. 

I had similar needs - filtering results based on information outside of the
queried Solr collection - and I went down the post-filtering path.
More specifically I've implemented a *PostFilter* which gets the info
outside of the current Solr collection and based on that it filters the
normal search results in the *collect(int docNumber)* method later on. It's
something similar to the approach described at 
http://qaware.blogspot.com.tr/2014/11/how-to-write-postfilter-for-solr-49.html
<http://qaware.blogspot.com.tr/2014/11/how-to-write-postfilter-for-solr-49.html>  

Did you consider such an approach? Do you think there are some downsides of
the post-filtering approach? And what extra functionality can I get from
XJoin (if they are doing the same thing more or less)?



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