How to get the suggester component working in SolrNet?

Question

I have configured my solrconfig.xml and schema.xml to query for the suggestions.

I am able to get the suggestions from the url

http://localhost:8080/         


        

Answer 1

I had the exact same requirement but could not find any way to easily handle Suggester results with SolrNet. Unfortunately, SolrNet seems to be built around the default /select request handler and does not currently support any other handler including /suggest for object type mappings (T). It expects all mappings to occur with indexed Solr document results and not suggester results.

Hence, @Paige Cook's answer did not work for me. T type with mappings is not compatible with a suggester results response. All the standard plumbing code from initializing the request (Startup.Init()) to querying (ISolrQueryResults results = solr.Query()) needs a mapped Solr document type and not a simple array of strings which the suggester provides.

Therefore, (similar to @dfay) I went with making a web request and parsing out the suggested results from the XML web response. The SolrConnection class was used for this:

string searchTerm = "ha";
string solrUrl = "http://localhost:8080/solr/collection1";
string relativeUrl = "/suggest";
var parameters = new Dictionary
                {
                    {"q", searchTerm},
                    {"wt", "xml"},
                };

var solrConnection = new SolrConnection(solrUrl);
string response = solrConnection.Get(relativeUrl, parameters);
// then use your favorite XML parser to extract 
// suggestions from the reponse string

Alternatively, instead of XML, the request can return a JSON response using the wt=json parameter:

var parameters = new Dictionary
                {
                    {"q", searchTerm},
                    {"wt", "json"}, // change this!
                };
// then use your favorite JSON parser