Reloading External file field with server up

Question

I am trying to implement an external file field in order to change ranking values in Solr.

I've defined a field and field type in the schema and, in the "solrconfig.xml", bellow the <query> tags, created the external file and added the reload listeners as described in the ref guide:

After server start up, I'm able to sort the documents based on that previous created field, however, when i change the values while the server is up and when I make a new search query, I'm not able to see the updated rank list (neither the updated rank scores).

I also tried adding a reload request handler as suggested in another post and tried a force commit (http://HOST:PORT/solr/update?commit=true), but it says:

DirectUpdateHandler2 No uncommitted changes. Skipping IW.commit.
DirectUpdateHandler2 end_commit_flush

Any suggestions?

Answer 1

Using ExternalFileFields for scoring is really not that useful any more, since Solr and Lucene now supports In-place updates for values that uses docValues.

You can then use those fields directly from your document for scoring, and you can update them without having to update the whole document. That way you don't have to reload anything externally, and your caches can be managed automagically by Solr.

There are three conditions a field has to pass for in-place updates (that being said, atomic updates can also be used, but that requires all your fields to be set as stored):

An atomic update operation is performed using this approach only when the fields to be updated meet these three conditions:

• are non-indexed (indexed="false"), non-stored (stored="false"), single valued (multiValued="false") numeric docValues (docValues="true") fields;

• the _version_ field is also a non-indexed, non-stored single valued docValues field; and,

• copy targets of updated fields, if any, are also non-indexed, non-stored single valued numeric docValues fields.