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:
One of the recurring themes of deploying Sitecore over the last few years has been "how do I deal with Solr?". It's a question with many valid answers... I've been doing some research for a client recently, because they wanted to run their own SolrCloud instances in Kubernetes - and I came across the Apache Foundation's "Solr Operator" project. It's an interesting shortcut to efficient containerised deployments of Solr, and it might help you too...
I've had some conversations recently about odd issues with search-driven sites, whose root cause was related to disaster recovery patterns. While it's important to make sure that your business-critical website has a good backup and recovery process in place, it's also important to pay attention to how to correctly configure these scenarios...
A while back I wrote about some initial investigations I'd made towards having SolrCloud in a containerised Sitecore instance. Since I worked on that, Sitecore have shipped their "official" container approach, so I've revisited my experiments using the examples Sitecore provides.
I've got a project on the cards that I'd like to use docker containers for, but we're talking about using SolrCloud for search. Right now, there isn't a SolrCloud container in the Sitecore community container repo. So I started thinking about what would it take to make one.
