Setting up and playing with Apache Solr on Tomcat

Download and extract Apache Tomcat and Solr and copy into your working folders.

Tomcat Setup

If you want tomcat as a service install it using the following:
bin\service.bat install
Edit the tomcat users under conf.:

<role rolename="admin"/>
<role rolename="manager-gui"/>
<user username="tomcat" password="tomcat" roles="admin,manager-gui"/>

If you are going to query Solr using international characters (>127) using HTTP-GET, you must configure Tomcat to conform to the URI standard by accepting percent-encoded UTF-8. Add: URIEncoding=’UTF-8′

<connector port="8080" protocol="HTTP/1.1"
           connectionTimeout="20000"
           redirectPort="8443"
URIEncoding="UTF-8" />

to the conf/server.xml

Copy the contents of the example\solr your solr home directory D:\Java\apache-solr-3.6.0\home
create the code fragment on $CATALINA_HOME/conf/Catalina/localhost/solr.xml pointing to your solr home.

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<context docBase="D:\Java\apache-tomcat-7.0.27\webapps\solr.war" debug="0" crossContext="true" >
    <environment name="solr/home" type="java.lang.String" value="D:\Java\apache-solr-3.6.0\home" override="true" />
</Context>

Startup tomcat, login, deploy the solr.war.

Solr Setup

It should be available at http://localhost:8080/solr/admin/ To create a quick test using SolrJ the creates and reads data: Grab the following Maven Libs:

<dependency>
       <groupid>org.apache.solr</groupId>
       <artifactid>apache-solr-solrj</artifactId>
       <version>3.6.0</version>
       <type>jar</type>
       <scope>compile</scope>
   </dependency>
   <dependency>
       <groupid>org.apache.httpcomponents</groupId>
       <artifactid>httpclient</artifactId>
       <version>4.1</version>
       <scope>compile</scope>
   </dependency>
   <dependency>
       <groupid>org.apache.httpcomponents</groupId>
       <artifactid>httpcore</artifactId>
       <version>4.1</version>
       <scope>compile</scope>
   </dependency>
   <dependency>
       <groupid>org.apache.james</groupId>
       <artifactid>apache-mime4j</artifactId>
       <version>0.6.1</version>
       <scope>compile</scope>
   </dependency>
   <dependency>
       <groupid>org.apache.httpcomponents</groupId>
       <artifactid>httpmime</artifactId>
       <version>4.1</version>
       <scope>compile</scope>
   </dependency>
   <dependency>
       <groupid>org.slf4j</groupId>
       <artifactid>slf4j-api</artifactId>
       <version>1.6.1</version>
       <scope>compile</scope>
   </dependency>
   <dependency>
       <groupid>commons-logging</groupId>
       <artifactid>commons-logging</artifactId>
       <version>1.1.1</version>
       <scope>compile</scope>
   </dependency>
   <dependency>
       <groupid>junit</groupId>
       <artifactid>junit</artifactId>
       <version>4.9</version>
       <scope>test</scope>
   </dependency>

JUnit test:

package za.co.discovery.ecs.solr.test;
 
import java.io.File;
import java.io.FileReader;
import java.io.IOException;
import java.net.MalformedURLException;
import java.net.URISyntaxException;
import java.util.ArrayList;
import java.util.Collection;
 
import org.apache.solr.client.solrj.SolrQuery;
import org.apache.solr.client.solrj.SolrServer;
import org.apache.solr.client.solrj.SolrServerException;
import org.apache.solr.client.solrj.impl.HttpSolrServer;
import org.apache.solr.client.solrj.response.QueryResponse;
import org.apache.solr.common.SolrDocument;
import org.apache.solr.common.SolrDocumentList;
import org.apache.solr.common.SolrInputDocument;
import org.junit.Assert;
import org.junit.Before;
import org.junit.Test;
import org.junit.runner.RunWith;
import org.junit.runners.JUnit4;
 
 
@RunWith(JUnit4.class)
public class TestSolr {
 
    private SolrServer server;
 
 
    /**
     * setup.
     */
    @Before
    public void setup() {
        server = new HttpSolrServer("http://localhost:8080/solr/");
        try {
            server.deleteByQuery("*:*");
        } catch (SolrServerException e) {
            e.printStackTrace();
        } catch (IOException e) {
            e.printStackTrace();
        }
    }
 
    /**
     * Test Adding.
     *
     * @throws MalformedURLException error
     */
    @Test
    public void testAdding() throws MalformedURLException {
 
        try {
 
            final SolrInputDocument doc1 = new SolrInputDocument();
            doc1.addField("id", "id1", 1.0f);
            doc1.addField("name", "doc1", 1.0f);
            doc1.addField("price", 10);
 
            final SolrInputDocument doc2 = new SolrInputDocument();
            doc2.addField("id", "id2", 1.0f);
            doc2.addField("name", "doc2", 1.0f);
            doc2.addField("price", 20);
 
            final Collection<solrinputdocument> docs = new ArrayList<solrinputdocument>();
            docs.add(doc1);
            docs.add(doc2);
 
            server.add(docs);
            server.commit();
 
            final SolrQuery query = new SolrQuery();
            query.setQuery("*:*");
            query.addSortField("price", SolrQuery.ORDER.asc);
            final QueryResponse rsp = server.query(query);
 
            final SolrDocumentList solrDocumentList = rsp.getResults();
 
            for (final SolrDocument doc : solrDocumentList) {
                final String name = (String) doc.getFieldValue("name");
                final String id = (String) doc.getFieldValue("id"); //id is the uniqueKey field
                System.out.println("Name:" + name + " id:" + id);
            }
 
        } catch (SolrServerException e) {
            e.printStackTrace();
            Assert.fail(e.getMessage());
        } catch (IOException e) {
            e.printStackTrace();
            Assert.fail(e.getMessage());
        }
    }
 
}

Adding data directly from the DB

Firstly you need to add the relevant DB libs to the add classpath. Then create data-config.xml as below, if you require custom fields, those can be specified under the fieldstag in the schema.xml shown below the dataconfig.xml

<dataconfig>
 <datasource name="jdbc" driver="oracle.jdbc.driver.OracleDriver" url="jdbc:oracle:thin:@localhost:1525:DB" user="user" password="pass"/>
    <document name="products">
        <entity name="item" query="select * from demo">
            <field column="ID" name="id" />
            <field column="DEMO" name="demo" />
 
            <entity name="feature" query="select description from feature where item_id='${item.ID}'">
                <field name="features" column="description" />
            </entity>
            <entity name="item_category" query="select CATEGORY_ID from item_category where item_id='${item.ID}'">
                <entity name="category" query="select description from category where id = '${item_category.CATEGORY_ID}'">
                    <field column="description" name="cat" />
                </entity>
            </entity>
        </entity>
    </document> 
</dataConfig> 

A custom field in the schema.xml:

<fields>
  <field name="DEMO" type="string" indexed="true" stored="true" required="true" /> 
</fields

Add in the solrconfig.xml make sure to point the the data-config.xml, the handler has to be registered in the solrconfig.xml as follows

<requestHandler name="/dataimport" class="org.apache.solr.handler.dataimport.DataImportHandler">
  <lst name="defaults">
    <str name="config">data-config.xml</str>
  </lst>
</requestHandler>

Once that is all setup a full import can be done with the following:

http://localhost:8080/solr/admin/dataimport?command=full-import

Then you should be good to go with some lightning fast data retrieval.

Reference: Setting up and playing with Apache Solr on Tomcat from our JCG partner Brian Du Preez at the Zen in the art of IT blog.