Find user's followers by username and name search with SOLR & PHP

Question

What I'm trying to do is create an input field that, as you type, it will search for users who follow you, based on the typed username and/or name.

I'm trying to use SOLR because it's fast and I'm unable to use MySQL's LIKE feature, but I'm running into issues with the number of values that I can pass to the SOLR query (e.g. user_id:(1,2,3,5,etc)). SOLR apparently has a limit on the number of values you can pass, and I need this solution to not be limited.

As of right now my SOLR index includes username, name, and user_id. I was then passing a list of previously collected follower_ids to the query.

Any ideas on how to make this work?

UPDATE: As suggested in the comments of increasing the # of OR clauses... this really isn't a good solution as it will cause future problems.

@AbhijitBashetti query syntax or a solution. Really anything to help me in the right direction. — stwhite, May 29 '15 at 14:14
http://localhost:8080/solr/select?&q=username:xyz&fq=follower_ids:(1 OR 2 OR 3 OR 4 OR 5) — Abhijit Bashetti, May 29 '15 at 14:22
@AbhijitBashetti as I stated in my description, there is a cap/limit on the number of items you can provide in this type of query. `user_id:1 OR 2 OR 3` as far as I know is the same as the query `user_id:(1 2 3 4)`. — stwhite, May 29 '15 at 17:45
ok..the you need increase the number of boolean clauses as that could the easiest solution.... — Abhijit Bashetti, May 30 '15 at 11:55
Unfortunately that causes other performance issues + scalability issues in the future. I'd love to find another solution that doesn't involve a "patch". — stwhite, May 31 '15 at 04:27
I have been using it since 3 years didn't find any performnace issue... — Abhijit Bashetti, May 31 '15 at 05:36
That may be fine for what you're using it for, but that's not a solution and really is irrelevant but I do appreciate your discussion. — stwhite, Jun 09 '15 at 17:43

score 0 · Accepted Answer · answered Jun 10 '15 at 08:10

I had the same issue of too many boolean clauses exception in solr. I had the acl ids(access control list) which are in more numbers so the query get too long.

Steps I have taken to overcome the issue is

Increase the maxBooleanCLauses
Used the in the filter query as &fq=acl:(id1 or id2...)
If the count of acl is greater than 8000 then i am sending multiple request with the below logic

StringBuilder queryString = new StringBuilder(5000); if (acls.length > 8000) { Integer aclCounter = 0; long requestCnt = Math.round(Math.ceil((acls.length / 8000.0))); for (int i = 0; i < requestCnt; i++) { queryString = new StringBuilder(acls.length * 10); queryString.append("&fq=acl:("); for (int j = 0; j < 8000 && aclCounter < acls.length; aclCounter++, j++) { queryString.append(acls[aclCounter]).append(APPEND_OR); } queryString.replace(queryString.length() - 4, queryString.length(), ")"); } }

I hope this would give a idea to resolve your issue.

Find user's followers by username and name search with SOLR & PHP

1 Answers1