Resolving items using SOLR

Question

Wiki post :

Item resolving is a time consuming task for Sitecore. If the item tree is wide (one item can have a lot of children) the search for item can be both resource and time consuming.

Question: How to optimze item search during item resolving?

Answer 1

To optimize item resolving time, we used SOLR search.

Custom index field

First we added new custom SOLR field :

public class RelativeUrlIndexField : IComputedIndexField
{
    public object ComputeFieldValue(IIndexable indexable)
    {
        try
        {
            // Item Url Generator is an abstraction over LinkBuiilder, to allow easier unit tests.
            var relativeUrl = itemUrlGenerator.GetRelativeItemUrl(item);

            if (relativeUrl.IsNullOrEmpty())
                return string.Empty;

            relativeUrl = new UrlModifier(relativeUrl)
                .RemoveCulture()  // Custom method that removes culture segment from url (E.g. /de/)
                .ToRelativeUrl(); // returns relative url

            return relativeUrl;
        }
        catch (Exception ex)
        {
            Logger.CrawlingError($"Unable to generate url for {item.ID}. ", ex);
            // Unable to generate url..
        }

        return string.Empty;
    }
}

Config

Adding newly created field to Sitecore default (or custom, which is recommended) index.

Content Search config file

<sitecore>
    <contentSearch>
        <indexConfigurations>
             <defaultSolrIndexConfiguration>
                 <documentOptions>
                     <fields>
                         <field fieldName="relativeurlcomputed" returnType="string">
                              MyProject.Feature.ItemResolving.
                         </field>
                     </fields>
                 </documentOptions>
             </defaultSolrIndexConfiguration>
        </indexConfigurations>
    </contentSearch>
</sitecore>

Solr search

Search results class

public class ItemResolvingSearchResult : SearchResultItem 
{
    private const string RelativeUrlComputedField = "relativeurlcomputed";
    [IndexField(RelativeUrlComputedField)]
    public string RelativeUrlGenericLink
    {
        get { return GetStringFromFields(RelativeUrlComputedField); }
        set {}
    }

}

Querying

Next thing was creating a SOLR query that will retrive item:

using (var searchContext = this._sitecoreSearchService.GetSearchContext())
{
    var searchResults = searchContext
        .GetQueryable<ItemResolvingSearchResult>(null)
        .Where(x => x.RelativeUrlGenericLink.EndsWith(url))
        .Take(3)
        .Select(r => new
                         {
                             r.ItemId,
                         })
        .ToList();

    var items = searchResults
        .Select(r => r.ItemId.Guid)
        .ToList();

    return items;
}