In Solr, How to query against one field for distinct set of values in a multi-valued field

Question

I basically want Solr to search each record of the multivalued field for my search parameter.. read on for my example:

I am using Solr to index my data. I have application data in parallel arrays (in the form of multi-valued fields) that match a given product. See the following example, where make, model, and year are multivalued fields:

<-solr record start->
sku: 1234
make: acura, acura, acura
model: integra, rsx, rsx
year: 1997, 2004, 2000
engine: 3.4, 4.5, 4.5
<-solr record end->

I am using filter queries (&fq=) to narrow my selections. The problem is, if someone looks up a 2000 Acura Integra, it will match the above record, but since the make, model, and year data is encoded in parallel, there actually is no 2000 Acura Integra for this product. Solr is matching the make in the make field, the model in the model field, and the year in the year field (as it should) and returning this result, and not respecting my parallelism. My Query would look like this so far:


fq=make:"acura"&fq=model:"integra"&fq=year:2000 (I would normally escape URL characters when I POST to Solr, this is just an example)

So my solution was to create another multivalued field, called summary field,in which I would put all the make, model, year and other data (like engine) together separated by a space. It is necessary to have quotations around the words so terms with multiple words don't match search parameters inadvertently. The above example would now look like this:

<-solr record start->
sku: 1234
make: acura, acura, acura
model: integra, rsx, rsx
year: 1997, 2004, 2000
engine: 3.4, 4.5, 4.5
summary: "acura" "integra" "1997" "3.4", "acura" "rsx" "2004" "4.5", "acura" "rsx" "2000", "4.5"
<-solr record end->

I then add to my query the following:

summary:(""acura" AND "integra" AND "2000")

I would expect, if I added that to my query, that this record would no longer come up, since there is no acura integra 2000 in the summary field. However, this doens't work. The record still comes up. I am stumped. Does anyone have a solution to this problem. It's been killing me for days.

I basically want Solr to search each record of the multivalued field for my search parameter.. is this possible? Is there a better way to do what I am trying to do?

Thanks

Answer 1

It seems that your schema isn't quite right. You need to completely denormalize your data and create one document per vehicle. What a "vehicle" means depends on what kind of searches you will run. For example, a possible schema would be:

sku: 1234
make: acura
model: integra
years: 1997
engines: 3.4, 4.5

sku: 1235
make: acura
model: rsx
years: 2000, 2004
engines: 4.5

The summary field would be a copyField of make+model+years+engines