Solr SearchResultItem indexer does not resolve dynamic field name on custom index

Question

Background: Sitecore 8.2.6, SOLR 5.4.1

I need to use class indexer to resolve field name for SOLR.

To simplify issue description let me provide next code snippet:

var fieldName = ..method parameter.ToLowerInvariant();
var products = context.GetQueryable<SearchItemResult>()
                    .Where(x => x[fieldName] != null)
                    .ToList().AsEnumerable();

For example, fieldName value that is passed to predicate is "shape". Index actually contains field shape_s.

The issue is such - when I use standard sitecore_web_index, in Search.log I can observe query where this shape is actually resolved to shape_s, and query does its job. But when I switch to custom sitecore_products_index which is based on web database and indexes just specific set of templates via <include hint="list:AddIncludedTemplate">, in Search.log I get error message '["undefined field shape"]'.

As far as I can think after all my experiments the only superficial difference is that web index contains all the templates, but custom product index contains reduced set of them.

If I inherit SearchItemResult to my custom class and define some property decorated with IndexField attribute, everything works fine if I use this approach. But in this specific task I have to use dynamic field name passed as parameter, so I want to use C# indexer for a SearchItemResult class to resolve this into SOLR's field name.

Answer 1

Based on previous projects, when using Where(x => x[fieldName] != null), the fieldName should match the one from the Solr Index. From your question, if you pass Where(x => x["shape_s"] != null), it should work.

Since you have dynamic fields being passed to the search context, you will need to get the field type. You can get it by using

var fieldNameWithType = context.Index.FieldNameTranslator.GetIndexFieldName("shape")

Solr will return the value shape_s. While debugging, you can see in the dictionary typeFieldMap the list of all fields how they are in the Solr Index.

Your code will look like below

var fieldName = ..method parameter.ToLowerInvariant();
var fieldNameWithType = context.Index.FieldNameTranslator.GetIndexFieldName(fieldName)
var products = context.GetQueryable<SearchItemResult>()
                .Where(x => x[fieldNameWithType] != null)
                .ToList().AsEnumerable();