CiviCRM Community Forums (archive)

Hi -  We need faceted full text search of our civi contacts including custom data.  Ideally with immediate updates to prevent confusion among users.

Technical details: Currently Drupal 7.16, Civi 4.2.6.  Relatively small data set with 100s to low thousands of records.

Use case:  We have a trade association-like organization.  Our CiviCRM data includes a custom description field for our contacts describing both organizational and individual skill sets.  These need to be tagged with five or six different "taxonomies" presumably as custom fields in civi.    Users should be able to search for contacts by key word and return a list of matches (both ind and org) and have the ability to drill down into this list via a faceted search.

Possible Solution:
As far as I can tell, the cleanest solution, building on the most existing work would be to use solr to index the civi data, then use Drupal's Search Api and related modules to use that solr server to access the indexed data.

So the question that remains is the one posed here: http://issues.civicrm.org/jira/browse/CRM-5652  How to get that solr index created and keep it updated.  That issue is marked Fixed/Completed in 3.1 (or maybe only the NYSS version??), but if there's documentation associated with how to make this work I can't find it although I do see https://github.com/civicrm/civicrm-core/tree/master/tools/scripts/solr which seems to be related

Some work also seems to have been done here: https://drupal.org/project/civicrmsolr. But that's on Drupal 6.x only and not well utilized.

Any comment on whether I'm heading the right way, or more information or suggestions about how to proceed would be helpful.

Thanks JonGold.  I reached out to Mark directly and hope to hear back. I'll post anything here that I learn.