Solr Auto Suggester With Sitecore

What is a Solr Suggester?

The Solr suggester component provides automatic suggestions to users, just like Google provides suggestions. Solr has a suggester component which is called SuggestComponent. More detail is available here

Configuration the SuggesterComponent

Navigate to this location “SolrFolder\server\solr\configsets\INDEXNAME \conf” and open “solrconfig.xml”. Search below comment in “solrconfig.xml” file.

 <!-- SearchHandler  
     http://wiki.apache.org/solr/SearchHandler  
     For processing Search Queries, the primary Request Handler  
     provided with Solr is "SearchHandler" It delegates to a sequent  
     of SearchComponents (see below) and supports distributed  
     queries across multiple shards  
   -->  

and paste the below code:

 <searchComponent name="suggest" class="solr.SuggestComponent">   
   <lst name="suggester">  
   <str name="name">contentSuggester</str>  
   <str name="lookupImpl">AnalyzingInfixLookupFactory</str>  
   <str name="dictionaryImpl">DocumentDictionaryFactory</str>  
   <str name="field">title_t</str>  
   <str name="contextField">_template</str>   
   <str name="suggestAnalyzerFieldType">text_general</str>  
   <str name="buildOnStartup">false</str>  
      <str name="highlight">false</str>  
  </lst>   
 </searchComponent>  

Adding the Suggest Request Handler

 <requestHandler name="/suggest" class="solr.SearchHandler" startup="lazy">  
  <lst name="defaults">  
   <str name="suggest">true</str>  
   <str name="suggest.count">10</str>  
       <str name="suggest.dictionary">contentSuggester</str>  
  </lst>  
  <arr name="components">  
   <str>suggest</str>  
  </arr>  
 </requestHandler>  

After this do not forget to reload Solr. 

To test Solr search suggester please follow the below steps:

• Go to Solr console.
• Select Core from “Core Selector”.
• Click on Query.
• Now type “/suggest” in Request-Handler(qt) .
• And type keyword in “q” which you want to search, in my case I am searching “sitecore” keyword.
• At last click on the “Execute Query” button.
• Now you can see results in which “sitecore” keyword is matched in the “_name” field.

If you want to filter value on basis of “contextField” which is a “_template” in my case then you can pass value in “suggest.cfq” just like this:

https://localhost:8988/solr/sc101_custom_master_index/suggest?q=sitecore&suggest.cfq=455a3e98a6274b408035e683a0331ac7

Create Helper class

• Add reference of below DLLs:
• SolrNet.dll
• Sitecore.ContentSearch.dll
• Sitecore.ContentSearch.SolrProvider.dll
• Sitecore.ContentSearch.SolrNetExtension.dll 

• Import the following namespaces:
• System.Collections.Generic
• System.Linq
• Sitecore.ContentSearch
• Sitecore.ContentSearch.SolrNetExtension
• Sitecore.ContentSearch.SolrProvider.SolrNetIntegration

Write below code, it will return a list of string:

 public IEnumerable<string> GetSearchSuggestion(string searchTerm,string templateId)  
 {  
   using (var ctx = ContentSearchManager.GetIndex("sc101_custom_master_index").CreateSearchContext())  
   {  
     SolrSuggestQuery q = searchTerm;      
     var options = new SuggestHandlerQueryOptions  
     {  
       Parameters = new SuggestParameters  
       {  
         Count = 10,  
         Build = true,  
                     ContextFilterQuery = templateId  
       }  
     };  
     var result = ctx.Suggest(q, options);  
     return result.Suggestions["contentSuggester"].Suggestions.Select(a => a.Term);  
   }  
 }