Setting Up Query Elevations

Question

This is related to Solr QueryElevationComponent component usage, but I'm looking for information on getting elevation setup.

I see some other questions involving Solr query elevation.

Is there documentation anywhere about getting elevation setup in the first place?

I imagine that I somehow need to get the enableElevation/forceElevation parameters into SolrNet.Commands.Parameters.CommonQueryOptions.ExtraParams, but I'm not sure how to get there.

I could get my own implementation of Sitecore.ContentSearch.SolrProvider.LinqToSolrIndex in there, but unfortunately there are no override points (the obvious method, BuildQueryOptions is private).

We're using Sitecore 8.2 Update-2 and Solr 5.4.1.

Thanks!

Answer 1

In my experience, trying to get ExtraParam to work with the Sitecore.ContentSearch especially in 8.* has been unfruitful (tried getting grouping to work on groupId with no luck) as the ExtraParams along with a lot of other SolrNet pieces are locked down an unexposed through the api. I used a different approach (in unrelated functionality to the grouping bit) to invoke the suggest handler in Solr (repurposed below):

var index = ContentSearchManager.GetIndex((SitecoreIndexableItem)contextDataItem);
var serviceUrl = SolrContentSearchManager.ServiceAddress.TrimEnd('/');
var handler = "/elevate";

IEnumerable<string> results = null;
var solrUrl = string.Format("{0}/{1}", serviceUrl, index.Name);
var solrConnection = new SolrConnection(solrUrl);

var parameters = new Dictionary<string, string>();
parameters.Add("q", searchTerm);
parameters.Add("enableElevation", "true");
parameters.Add("forceElevation", "true");
parameters.Add("df", "text");
parameters.Add("wt", "xml");

var xmlResponse = solrConnection.Get(handler, parameters);
var xmlDocument = new XmlDocument();
xmlDocument.LoadXml(xmlResponse);
//parse the returned xml into proper results
results = _parseSuggestion(xmlDocument, suggestionType).ToList();

return results;

Which would invoke something like http://localhost:8983/solr/your_products_master/elevate?q=ipod&df=text&debugQuery=true&enableElevation=true&forceElevation=true

I realize that this approach pretty much circumvents using Predicate Builder or really any of the ContentSearch api already in place. In Sitecore 9 I believe they opened up a lot of the api to allow for passing QueryOptions and possibly ExtraParams as well (have not had a chance to confirm). Hopefully this helps even if only a little.