Behavior of a Solr suggester using spellchecker

[Cedric Ulmer <ce...@francelabs.com>]

Dear Solr community,

I am facing a behavior with a suggest request handler that does not look normal to me, and I would like to understand.


  *   Here is the configuration of the suggest component :

<searchComponent class="solr.SpellCheckComponent" name="suggest">
                <lst name="spellchecker">
                               <str name="name">suggest</str>
                               <str name="classname">org.apache.solr.spelling.suggest.Suggester</str>
                               <str name="lookupImpl">org.apache.solr.spelling.suggest.tst.TSTLookup</str>
                               <str name="field">suggest</str>
                               <float name="threshold">${autocomplete.threshold:0.005}</float>
                               <str name="buildOnCommit">true</str>
                </lst>
</searchComponent>


  *   Here is the configuration of the request handler :

<requestHandler class="org.apache.solr.handler.component.SearchHandler" name="/suggest">
                <lst name="defaults">
                               <str name="df">suggest</str>
                               <str name="spellcheck">true</str>
                               <str name="spellcheck.dictionary">suggest</str>
                               <str name="spellcheck.onlyMorePopular">true</str>
                               <str name="spellcheck.count">10</str>
                               <str name="fl">score</str>
                               <str name="spellcheck.collate">true</str>
                               <str name="spellcheck.collateExtendedResults">true</str>
                               <str name="spellcheck.maxCollations">10</str>
                               <str name="spellcheck.maxCollationTries">100</str>
                               <str name="spellcheck.count">10</str>
                               <str name="spellcheck.collate">true</str>
                </lst>
                <arr name="components">
                               <str>suggest</str>
                               <str>query</str>
                </arr>

                <lst name="appends">
                                <str name="fq">{!manifoldCFSecurity}</str>
               </lst>
</requestHandler>

For info, the "manifoldCFSecurity" parameter leads to a MCFQueryParser that generates a boolean query to be applied to the search.

When one performs a request on this handler, the parse() method of the MCFQueryParser is called by Solr for the main query, but also one additional time per suggested term. This behavior looks weird to me as it appears to be suboptimal to do one query per suggested term.

Is it normal ? Did I make a mistake in the configurations ?

Thanks for your help.

Regards,

Cedric