Solr 1.4 contains a little advertised feature that I think folks ought to know about, Solritas. What a silly name, you say! Yeah, ok, call it the boring ol’ VelocityResponseWriter if you like. Pronunciation accessibility aside, Solritas makes Solr responses look like a real user interface. Close enough for government work, as they say. We’ve effectively used Solritas on a number of our recent engagements. After bringing clients’ data into Solr for the first time, wow, they have a search box, facets, and even toggle-able inline hit score explanations and request/response dumps (when using &debugQuery=true). And we like to toss the clients’ logo in the upper left for good measure, because we can and it’s easy.
Follow a few straightforward steps to enable Solritas on the example application which ships with Solr 1.4:
- Add the VelocityResponseWriter libraries directory to the example solrconfig.xml
- Register it as a response writer plugin, named “velocity”.
- Copy a templates directory -
cp -R contrib/velocity/src/main/solr/conf/velocity example/solr/conf/velocity
- And while we’re at it, we’ll create a nicely named (URLs matter too) request handler mapping that defaults to the velocity writer type, and a few other basic settings that make sense for the example data.
A diff of the only configuration file touched here, solrconfig.xml, is provided at the end to give you the details of the above steps.
Now Start up Solr
cd example java -jar start.jar
Index the example data (from another shell)
cd example/exampledocs java -jar post.jar *.xml
and visit http://localhost:8983/solr/itas. It should looks something like this screenshot:
Hey, I want my XML back! Ok, append &wt=xml to the URL; it’s the same results, just presented differently.
Adding debugQuery=true to a request, we get a pleasant inline view of Lucene’s explanation for the score computation of each result, see for yourself at http://localhost:8983/solr/itas?q=ipod&debugQuery=true, looks something like this, with explanations initially hidden and toggled into visibility individually by clicking the “toggle explain” link that now appears:
There’s a lot of interesting power and potential lurking within Solritas. Here are a few notable existing capabilities:
- Templates are searched for in the request parameters, a file system base directory, and the classpath – in that order. This allows the requesting client to override a sub-template such as the header, on a per-request basis, plugins bundled in JAR files may contain their own templates, and the file system can override embedded templates.
- Several useful “tools” (as Velocity calls them) are available to format numbers and dates, URL encode strings, and other practically necessary utilities to make data presentable to humans and hyperlinks.
- Straightforward access within a template to the entire Solr request and response objects
The following diffs are the only changes needed to light up Solritas on Solr 1.4′s example application -
48a49,51 > <!-- Added path to VelocityResponseWriter library and dependencies --> > <lib dir="../../contrib/velocity/src/main/solr/lib"/> > 501a505,525 > <!-- /itas mapping for Solritas view with some basic good defaults: like dismax, facet on cat --> > <requestHandler name="/itas"> > <lst name="defaults"> > <str name="v.template">browse</str> > <str name="title">Solritas Demonstration</str> > > <str name="wt">velocity</str> > <str name="defType">dismax</str> > <str name="q.alt">*:*</str> > <str name="rows">10</str> > <str name="fl">*,score</str> > <str name="facet">on</str> > <str name="facet.field">cat</str> > <str name="facet.mincount">1</str> > <str name="qf"> > text^0.5 features^1.0 name^1.2 sku^1.5 id^10.0 manu^1.1 cat^1.4 > </str> > </lst> > </requestHandler> > > 1006a1031,1033 > <!-- Light up VelocityResponseWriter --> > <queryResponseWriter name="velocity" class="org.apache.solr.request.VelocityResponseWriter"/> >
[...] Lucid Imagination » Solritas: Solr 1.4’s Hidden Gem Solr 1.4 contains a little advertised feature that I think folks ought to know about, Solritas. What a silly name, you say! Yeah, ok, call it the boring ol’ VelocityResponseWriter if you like. Pronunciation accessibility aside, Solritas makes Solr responses look like a real user interface. Close enough for government work, as they say. We’ve effectively used Solritas on a number of our recent engagements. After bringing clients’ data into Solr for the first time, wow, they have a search box, facets, and even toggle-able inline hit score explanations and request/response dumps (when using &debugQuery=true). And we like to toss the clients’ logo in the upper left for good measure, because we can and it’s easy. (tags: todo solr userinterface) [...]
November 5, 2009 14:11 — Webhamer Weblog: Search & ICT-related blogging » links for 2009-11-05
Hi Erik,
I was able to get the example working but when trying to deploy under Tomcat 5.5 I appear to be having problems with permissions on creation of “velocity.log”. As far as I can see, all possible locations where the file might be created are writable by the tomcat user and when the test example is run, it doesn’t appear to ever create a “velocity.log” file anywhere.
Any pointers/ideas on how this might be resolved?
REGARDS
INFO: Server startup in 7100 ms
Nov 23, 2009 12:05:21 AM org.apache.solr.request.UnInvertedField uninvert
INFO: UnInverted multi-valued field {field=category,memSize=4224,tindexSize=32,time=7,phase1=7,nTerms=0,bigTerms=0,termInstances=0,uses=0}
Nov 23, 2009 12:05:21 AM org.apache.solr.core.SolrCore execute
INFO: [] webapp=/solr path=/itas params={} hits=19631 status=0 QTime=76
Nov 23, 2009 12:05:21 AM org.apache.solr.common.SolrException log
SEVERE: java.lang.RuntimeException: org.apache.velocity.exception.VelocityException: Failed to initialize an instance of org.apache.velocity.runtime.log.Log4JLogChute with the current runtime configuration.
at org.apache.solr.request.VelocityResponseWriter.getEngine(VelocityResponseWriter.java:148)
at org.apache.solr.request.VelocityResponseWriter.write(VelocityResponseWriter.java:44)
at org.apache.solr.servlet.SolrDispatchFilter.writeResponse(SolrDispatchFilter.java:325)
at org.apache.solr.servlet.SolrDispatchFilter.doFilter(SolrDispatchFilter.java:254)
at org.apache.catalina.core.ApplicationFilterChain.internalDoFilter(ApplicationFilterChain.java:202)
at org.apache.catalina.core.ApplicationFilterChain.doFilter(ApplicationFilterChain.java:173)
at org.apache.catalina.core.StandardWrapperValve.invoke(StandardWrapperValve.java:213)
at org.apache.catalina.core.StandardContextValve.invoke(StandardContextValve.java:178)
at org.apache.catalina.core.StandardHostValve.invoke(StandardHostValve.java:126)
at org.apache.catalina.valves.ErrorReportValve.invoke(ErrorReportValve.java:105)
at org.apache.catalina.core.StandardEngineValve.invoke(StandardEngineValve.java:107)
at org.apache.catalina.connector.CoyoteAdapter.service(CoyoteAdapter.java:148)
at org.apache.coyote.http11.Http11Processor.process(Http11Processor.java:869)
at org.apache.coyote.http11.Http11BaseProtocol$Http11ConnectionHandler.processConnection(Http11BaseProtocol.java:664)
at org.apache.tomcat.util.net.PoolTcpEndpoint.processSocket(PoolTcpEndpoint.java:527)
at org.apache.tomcat.util.net.LeaderFollowerWorkerThread.runIt(LeaderFollowerWorkerThread.java:80)
at org.apache.tomcat.util.threads.ThreadPool$ControlRunnable.run(ThreadPool.java:684)
at java.lang.Thread.run(Thread.java:595)
Caused by: org.apache.velocity.exception.VelocityException: Failed to initialize an instance of org.apache.velocity.runtime.log.Log4JLogChute with the current runtime configuration.
at org.apache.velocity.runtime.log.LogManager.createLogChute(LogManager.java:206)
at org.apache.velocity.runtime.log.LogManager.updateLog(LogManager.java:255)
at org.apache.velocity.runtime.RuntimeInstance.initializeLog(RuntimeInstance.java:795)
at org.apache.velocity.runtime.RuntimeInstance.init(RuntimeInstance.java:250)
at org.apache.velocity.app.VelocityEngine.init(VelocityEngine.java:107)
at org.apache.solr.request.VelocityResponseWriter.getEngine(VelocityResponseWriter.java:133)
… 17 more
Caused by: java.lang.RuntimeException: Error configuring Log4JLogChute :
at sun.reflect.NativeConstructorAccessorImpl.newInstance0(Native Method)
at sun.reflect.NativeConstructorAccessorImpl.newInstance(NativeConstructorAccessorImpl.java:39)
at sun.reflect.DelegatingConstructorAccessorImpl.newInstance(DelegatingConstructorAccessorImpl.java:27)
at java.lang.reflect.Constructor.newInstance(Constructor.java:494)
at org.apache.velocity.util.ExceptionUtils.createWithCause(ExceptionUtils.java:67)
at org.apache.velocity.util.ExceptionUtils.createRuntimeException(ExceptionUtils.java:45)
at org.apache.velocity.runtime.log.Log4JLogChute.initAppender(Log4JLogChute.java:133)
at org.apache.velocity.runtime.log.Log4JLogChute.init(Log4JLogChute.java:85)
at org.apache.velocity.runtime.log.LogManager.createLogChute(LogManager.java:157)
… 22 more
Caused by: java.io.FileNotFoundException: velocity.log (Permission denied)
at java.io.FileOutputStream.openAppend(Native Method)
at java.io.FileOutputStream.(FileOutputStream.java:177)
at java.io.FileOutputStream.(FileOutputStream.java:102)
at org.apache.log4j.FileAppender.setFile(FileAppender.java:289)
at org.apache.log4j.RollingFileAppender.setFile(RollingFileAppender.java:167)
at org.apache.log4j.FileAppender.(FileAppender.java:108)
at org.apache.log4j.RollingFileAppender.(RollingFileAppender.java:69)
at org.apache.velocity.runtime.log.Log4JLogChute.initAppender(Log4JLogChute.java:118)
… 24 more
November 22, 2009 05:32 — Peter Hancox
To Peter:
I had the same problem and found a solution at
http://www.minaret.biz/tips/tomcatLogging.html#velocity
–Davide Principi
February 5, 2010 03:28 — Davide Principi
[...] Solritas – better than xml responses [...]
June 9, 2010 00:27 — My Links for Apache Solr 1.4 « Find Time for the Karussell