Indexing your data into solr

Blacklight uses Solr as its data index. Blacklight is agnostic as to how that Solr index gets populated. Initial Blacklight development was geared towrrds work in university libraries, and deals with library data in the MARC format. The Blacklight out-of-the-box demo and test suite is geared towards that use case, but Blacklight itself is not limited to only serving MARC-based data.

Common Patterns

If you're not dealing with MARC records, you might do something like the following:

class MyModel < ActiveRecord::Base
  after_save :index_record
  before_destroy :remove_from_index

  attr_accessible :field_i_want_to_index

  def to_solr
    # *_texts here is a dynamic field type specified in solrconfig.xml
    {'id' => id,
     'field_i_want_to_index_texts' => field_i_want_to_index}
  end

  def index_record
    SolrService.add(self.to_solr)
    SolrService.commit
  end

  def remove_from_index
    SolrService.delete_by_id(self.id)
    SolrService.commit
  end
end

What’s the relationship between Blacklight and SolrMarc?

However, one excellent way to index lots of MARC records into Solr quickly is to use SolrMarc. Some of the same people are active in both projects, e.g, Bob Haschart from UVA and Naomi Dushay from Stanford University. SolrMarc is not a Blacklight-specific project, it is also used by VuFind and other projects, and is a separate project that exists in its own right.