I've not dug into the details of what and how SDL Tridion is storing data in it's internal search engine (SOLR), but I need to build a GUI extension that needs to perform searching on component/metadata fields across publications.
I can't see any reason not to have a look into SOLR, but before I invest the time, does anyone know any reason why this would be a bad idea?
Thanks in advance!
It's a bad idea in general to bypass the API and directly query SOLR. From your question, I see no reason to do so.
Do you need to index more data than what is already indexed by Tridion? If not, surely you can just search using the API?
If you do, you could consider implementing a custom Search Indexing Handler for the additional data. Although this is not very well documented at the moment, it seem rather straight forward to create (implement ISearchIndexingHandler and update your CM and SOLR configuration). The benefit would be that your data can also be searched for using the standard Tridion search.
It really depends on your search requirements. If it's just about simple search - then it's probably fine, but if you want to make some Tridion specific searches then it will be quite difficult as SDL Tridion does a lot of post processing on SOLR results. Why can't you just use CoreService and have a convenient supported search interface?
As Peter said, its really a bad idea to interact with SOLR that comes with Tridion. Tridion has a abstraction layer to hide complexity of SOLR query. For example tridion hides case sensivity of the search keyword.
I strongly recommend to use tridion search api to build ur interface. Tridion search api also supports executing solr query directly. But its not recommended.
For indexing additional data u can implement ISearchIndexingHandler. It has some complexity with the solr config files (adding new fields).
