Websphere Commerce Creating a custom SOLR core

This page describes how we can create custom SOLR cores in commerce. Let's think of a e commerce site where we retailers can log in and can register there shops. We want to index Shops so that user can search for different shops.

SOLR Core Naming Convention

A custom SOLR core has to be named according to OOTB convention MC_10001_<coreName>_en_US. The core name should be a single word without any underscores in it. An entry in solr.xml will look like as below

<core instanceDir="MC_10001\en_US\Shops\" name="MC_10001_Shops_en_US" />

Registering custom core with Search server

Create a new folder along with the other SOLR cores, "Shops" at /search/solr/home/MC_10001/en_US/




• Shops should have a "conf" folder for configuration XMLs.

• Define SQL in /conf/wc-data-config.xml and map the database fields with SOLR fields.

• Define SOLR fields in schema.xml




We need to register our custom SOLR core with Search Server. A typical entry in 

/Search/xml/config/com.ibm.commerce.catalog-ext/wc-search.xml will look like:

<_config:core catalog="10001" indexName="Shops"

            language="en_US" name="MC_10001_Shops_en_US"

            path="/MC_10001/en_US/Shops" serverName="BasicConfiguration" />




At this time, if everything is setup properly, you should be able to hit the newly created SOLR core

http://localhost/solr/MC_10001_Shops_en_US/select?q=*:*

Indexing data in custom Index




We can't use OOTB build index and preprocess utility to index data in custom core. These utilities are very much tied to Catalog entities. For custom cores, our data should be index ready. We may need to define complex SQLs in wc-data-config.xml to get the data index ready as we can't use preprocessing here.




For Indexing, we can rely on DIH commands and can directly hit import URL to index the data as below:

http://localhost/solr/MC_10001_Shops_en_US/dataimport?command=full-import