Solr won't search on fields belonging to nested entities - search

Question

I am using apache solr for bulding search for a website.
I am using nested entities to import data from different tables. Dataimport is successfull and all the documents are being added to the index. My dataConfig goes like this :
<dataConfig>
<dataSource type="JdbcDataSource" driver ="com.mysql.jdbc.Driver" url="jdbc:mysql://localhost/purplle_purplle2" user="purplle_purplle" password="purplle123" />
<document name="doc">
<entity name="offer" query="SELECT * FROM service_offering WHERE module LIKE 'location' ">
<field column="name" name="name"/>
<field column="id" name="id" />
<field column="type_id" name="type_id" />
<entity name="offer_type" query=" select name from service_offeringtype where id='${offer.type_id}'" >
<field column="name" name="offer_type" />
</entity>
<entity name="offer_location" query=" select name from service_location where id='${offer.module_id}'" >
<field column="name" name="location_name" />
</entity>
<entity name="offer_address" query=" select * from service_address where module_id='${offer.module_id}' AND module LIKE 'location'" >
<entity name="loc_city" query=" select name from loc_city where id='${offer_address.city}'" >
<field column="name" name="loc_city" />
</entity>
<entity name="loc_area" query=" select name from loc_area where id='${offer_address.area}'" >
<field column="name" name="loc_area" />
</entity>
<entity name="loc_zone" query=" select name from loc_zone where id='${offer_address.zone}'" >
<field column="name" name="loc_zone" />
</entity>
</entity>
</entity>
</document>
</dataConfig>
Now if i directly do a search on this index. The results are fetched only for "name" field. It returns null for other fields namely "loc_area","location_name","loc_city" etc.
My schema looks like this
<field name="id" type="int" indexed="true" stored="true" />
<field name="name" type="string" indexed="true" stored="true" />
<field name="offer_type" type="string" indexed="true" stored="true" />
<field name="location_name" type="string" indexed="true" stored="true" />
<field name="type_id" type="string" indexed="true" stored="true" />
<field name="loc_city" type="string" indexed="true" stored="true" />
<field name="loc_area" type="string" indexed="true" stored="true" />
<field name="loc_zone" type="string" indexed="true" stored="true" />
However if i copy these fields into a "text" field which is present by default in the schema.xml. Then by searching on "text" field i easily get the relevant results.
<copyField source="name" dest="text"/>
<copyField source="offer_type" dest="text"/>
<copyField source="location_name" dest="text"/>
<copyField source="loc_city" dest="text"/>
<copyField source="loc_area" dest="text"/>
<copyField source="loc_zone" dest="text"/>
But i cannot do it like this because i have to assign boost levels to different fields for calcuation of score. The moment i append this in the query syntax "&defType=edismax&qf=name^1.0+location_name^10.0+loc_area^50.0" it returns null results.
What is wrong?

Answer 1

My guess is that your problem is the type of your fields. I don't know exactly what your fields contain, but there is a difference between type="string" and type = "text".
The String type indexes an untokenized String value of the entire field input. Text type tokenizes and analyzes the the field. For example, if I search for "john" against a string field containing "John Smith" I would not expect a hit, where if the field were a text field, I would get a hit.
Since your query seems to work against a text field, and not a string field, changing the types and reindexing seems to be a likely solution.