Is there a way to use asterix in Sitecore SOLR configuration root?

Question

First of all a little context.

I'm using Sitecore 8.1 with Solr 5.5.0-1 and my data are stored like this :

sitecore  
->content  
-->Assistance  
--->Products  
---->Alarms  
----->Themes  
------>Theme1  
------->Questions  
---->Interruptors  
----->Themes  
------>Theme1  
------->Questions  
---->...

Is there a way I can set the root of my crawler like so to index the themes and questions ?

<Root>/sitecore/content/Assistance/Produits/*/Themes</Root>

The real problem is that if my client add a new type of product the index will not search at all in it.

Answer 1

I don't think you can use a wildcard in the root - a path or guid should work. What you could do to solve your problem is set /sitecore/content/Assistance/Produits as root and use the list:IncludeTemplate (or list:ExcludeTemplate) feature in the index configuration.

This will take your global root, but filter the items on the template(s). If you only want themes and questions on your index, you can only include those templates:

<include hint=”list:IncludeTemplate”>
   <Theme>{....}</Theme>
   <Question>{...}</Question>
</include>

This way your customer (editor) can add as many products (s)he wants, the index will pick up the themes and questions. Whether to use include or exclude depends on the templates (how many are used / how many you need) but I usually use the include feature as this configuration is more clear (to see what's all in there) and allows you to add other templates in the tree without changing the config.