Islandora Solr Settings

Overview

The Islandora Solr Settings page has configuration options for searching and displaying the properties, descriptive metadata, full text, and OCR data of repository objects stored in Solr.

Configuration

Display Profiles

Display profiles control how the Solr search results are displayed to users who search Islandora.

Primary display profiles

• Bookmark - This is used by the Islandora Bookmark module, which must be enabled and configured separately, to display search results as a table in which a checkbox appears next to each item so it can be bookmarked.
• List - This is the default Islandora display profile. It will display all fields available in Solr unless you specify which fields you want displayed and check "Limit results to fields listed above?". 
• Grid - This displays the thumbnail and title field of every item in the results (similar to how collections are displayed by default).
• Table - This displays results as a table, with a column for each field configured in the Default display settings menu. This profile can be configured under the Table Profile Settings tab.

If you enable multiple display profiles, to grant your users the ability to switch between them, you will also have to add the Islandora Displays block to a region (such as a sidebar, or above the content) in admin/structure/block. 

Secondary display profiles

• CSV - this enables an option to export the search results as a comma-separated file
• RSS - this enables an option to make search results available as an RSS feed. This profile is configured in the "RSS Settings" tab.

Enabling these options will place an icon for the respective option next to your Solr search results.

Default display settings

This section has options for which fields display and how they display in Solr search results for the "List" and "Table" display profiles. The "Grid" and "Bookmark" profiles are not affected by these settings.

Display fields

Add metadata fields from Solr's index to the list of fields that will display for each item in the Solr search results.

1. In the "Add another item" box, begin typing a Solr field name (the box will provide suggestions as you type). See Appendix D for a list of eligible field names. 
2. Click Add to add the field to the display.
3. Once a field has been added, click Configure for more options. Different field types will have different options for configuration.
   
   1. Label: Enter a user-friendly display label to represent the field in the search results.
   2. Linking: Link this field to the object it describes (use for fairly unique values, like titles or identifiers). With some fields it can be used as a link to perform a new search based on the value of the field (such as author names, subject terms, or series titles for a related items search).
   3. Highlight: Check this box to enable highlighting the search term in the field(s) where it is found (keyword in context). Only works on tokenized fields. See Appendix D where this is explained. 
   4. Maximum length: Truncate field values in the search results display. Useful for longer fields such as notes, descriptions, or full text.
   5. Permissions: Specify which users by Drupal roles who should have access to this field.

Limit results to field listed above?

Check this box to limit the search results to display only the fields entered in Display fields. This will affect the "List" and "Table" display only. The "Grid" display is fixed. To configure the metadata for the "Bookmark" display see Islandora Bookmark.

Results per page

Enter a number for how many objects should appear on each page of search results.

Enable search navigation block

Check this box to enable a block that gives users a previous/next browse through search results after selecting an item, as well as an option to return to the main list of search results.

You can expose this function to users by adding the Islandora search navigation block to a region (such as the First Sidebar or Second Sidebar) in admin/structure/block.

Sort settings

This menu lets you select fields that users can manipulate themselves to re-order the Solr search results page. These fields can be metadata fields or item properties ("fgs_" type fields) and those fields don't even have to be displayed fields. Or you can just specify relevancy.

Sort fields must not be multivalued fields. For more on this see Appendix D. 

You can expose the sort fields to users by adding the Islandora sort block to a region (such as a sidebar) in admin/structure/block.

The default sort field is "score" which is a relevancy ranking based on how well the search query matches each result. The way that different fields are valued is configurable in Solr. 

Facet settings

Facets are search terms that users can use to refine search results. For example, searchers can use facets to narrow down the results to only those that match a specific subject heading, or were created by a specific author, or are of a certain type, or are within a certain date range.

Facet fields from Solr should be non-tokenized strings. For more on this see Appendix D. As you type in the fields in "Add another item" the eligible Solr fields will be indicated in with the word "(string)."

you can expose the facet to users by adding the Islandora facets block to a region (such as a sidebar) in admin/structure/block.

• Minimum limit: There must be at least this number of values in the search results before the facet displays on the search results page. A higher minimum limit will result in fewer facets displaying.
• Soft limit: The number of facet values to display above the "Show more" link. If you enter 0, all facet values between the minimum and maximum limits will be displayed.
• Maximum limit: The maximum number of values to display for each facet. Entering 20 would display the 20 most frequently occurring values in each facet and a "Show more" link would be automatically added to provide access to the rest of the values.

Advanced search block

Advanced search is a way to build search queries that search within specific Solr fields (as opposed to the "simple" search box, which searches across the indexed values of all fields in Solr).

Advanced search fields in Solr should be tokenized fields. All Dublin Core fields, for example, are tokenized. For more on this see Appendix D.

Default boolean operator - An option for whether search results must contain all terms entered in the advanced search (AND) or any term entered in the advanced search (OR) in order to display.

For example:

(Title = report) AND (Creator = Department of Communications) will return only objects that have "report" in the title and were created by the Department of Communications

(Title = report) OR (Creator = Department of Communications) will return all objects that have "report" in the title as well as all objects created by the Department of Communications

(Title = report) NOT (Creator = Department of Communications) will return all objects that have "report" in the title, excluding objects that were created by the Department of Communications

You can expose the Advanced search to users by adding the Islandora advanced search block to a region in admin/structure/block.

Another way to present the Advanced search block is to add it to the content theme region (the main section on a page) and set the Advanced search block to display only on a specific node (an "advanced search" page node created in Drupal.)

Query defaults

This menu contains settings that apply to all Solr queries in Islandora. Installations of Islandora that have namespace restrictions must enter the namespaces here to restrict the search results to only the relevant namespaces. You can enter more than one namespace

The values appearing in the figure below serve only as examples.

Required Solr fields

These Solr fields are required by Islandora in order to create a repository browse interface and manage Fedora objects. These fields are populated with default values and should probably not be changed.

Other (debugging Solr)

This section contains a checkbox to turn "debug mode" on or off. Debug mode for Solr will show the text of Solr queries in the Drupal display, and generally should not be used in a production site.

New in Islandora 7.x-1.10 is the tab Solr Breadrumbs.

Note: 

Many of the options configured in the Solr Settings menus affect only searches and results sets associated with Solr searches. You can recognize a Solr search by the URL string "/islandora/search/...". Other types of searches, such as browsing, using URLs like "/islandora/repository" and "/islandora/object/..." will not be affected by some of the options set here in Solr Settings.