[Koha-devel] Solr / zebra / search in Koha 3.10 => starting a workgroup

[Dobrica Pavlinusic]

On Sat, Mar 31, 2012 at 05:22:04PM +0200, Frédéric Demians wrote:
> For me, the most undecided/mysterious part of the whole is the query
> parser. Now, Koha support several syntaxes thanks to ZOOM yaz client: PQF,
> CCL and CQL. Queries in those syntaxes are directly given to ZOOM. I
> can't figure out how it can be reproduced with other search engine than
> Zebra... This isn't a small piece of engineering. See above the citation
> about Data::SearcEngine::ElasticSearch. It's one thing to abstract a
> search result and its paging, and another thing to abstract a query
> language--imagine three languages...

grep ZOOM::Query C4/*

indeed shows that we are using all variations of ZOOM query languages
;-)

But, it seems that rest of Koha code is calling mostly
C4::Search::SimpleSearch with small subset of query language which could be
rewritten for other engines.

I would opt to extend C4::Search API with small special purpose wrappers for
various search cases, for example:

C4::Search::SimpleSearchCatalog would add "kw,wrdl:$query" for Zebra
and pass it to C4::Search::SimpleSearch.

This would make $query in code to be only user entered query as opposed
to CCL+user query.

Problem with our current CCL+user query approach manifests itself in
intranet:

1. do search for "human"
2. click Z39.50 Search
3. wonder why Title: includes "kw.wrdl: human" instead of only "human"

Clicking Search without erasing first "kw,wrdl:" results in "Nothing
found." which is wrong.

p.s. is there easy way to get started with SOLR code to test it? I know
this was probably answered in Marsielle, but I was too busy with plack
;-)

-- 
Dobrica Pavlinusic               2share!2flame            dpavlin at rot13.org
Unix addict. Internet consultant.             http://www.rot13.org/~dpavlin