Jeremy Davis
Sitecore, C# and web development
A while back I wrote up some notes on a problem some people were seeing with Sitecore's SolrCloud developer container that I'd been unable to fix. It was the worst sort of technical problem, happening irregularly on some computers, but never rearing its head on others. So it's taken me a while to get around to coming up with a fix for this. But if you've suffered from the problems described in my previous post, this is an option for you:
A while back I wrote a post about how you could extract the raw Solr query from Sitecore's ContentSearch APIs. Usually the queries hid behind LINQ operations, but there are times where having the raw text can be helpful - sometimes Sitecore's API doesn't support the operations you need. That work was done under Sitecore v10.0, but having tried to repeat it under v10.2, I discover it no longer works. There have been some changes under the surface of ContentSearch which require a different approach. So if you need to do this under v10.2, here's how:
Usually with these blog posts, I find a problem, I fight with it for a bit, and then I solve the problem. But this post has been sitting half-written in my publishing queue since May (!) this year, and I have entirely failed to solve this issue. So I'm admitting defeat, and publishing this anyway because maybe one of you knows the answer. Or at least it might serve as a warning...
My issue is that I've been working through some really odd and annoying Solr issues which only manifest in Docker on one laptop. I'm really not sure if these are issues that others might see, or if this is a problem that's entirely down to this laptop's setup. But they're definitely a problem...
One thing we don't seem to be short of these days is options for deploying Solr. I've had to do a bit of thinking about this recently, as I draw up plans for a work project. So I figured I'd write a bit of it down because if I'm having to explain it to people, then chances are there are plenty of others out there in Internet Land who are finding themselves having to think about these issues too:
With all the excitement about containers and SaaS and the like, it's been a while since I've spent time worrying about local Solr installs. But recently my good pal low-effort Solr Installs" script doesn't work with recent Solr releases. So I figured I should fix that, because it's clearly still useful for some people...
An issue I've bumped into a number of times over the years, is that sometimes developers want to be able to look at the query that got generated when they did something with Sitecore's ContentSearch APIs. The traditional answer of "go look in the logs" is one way to deal with this, but some recent project work got me wondering if there were alternatives...
Symposium 2019 seems a loooong time ago now – but it was only last November. Back then, I did a session on understanding the basics of Solr and SolrCloud to help Sitecore developers with their production deployments.
This year, my talk at Sitecore Symposium was an introduction to deploying Solr for production use. It covered why you want SolrCloud, what you need to plan for it, and how you can go about installing it. Enough for a beginner to get from a blank Windows Server to running SolrCloud, and Sitecore configured to match.
If you missed my talk, or if you saw it and want to study it further, then you are in luck!
One of the interesting changes that's part of the coming release of Sitecore v9.3 is the integration of the Solr installation into the SIF scripts for developers. Given I've had a go at doing this myself in the past, I thought it would be interesting to look at their approach and see how it works...
Having spent some time deploying instances of Java for Solr servers recently, I came across two things that wasted my time. So...
