Using Solr's Ruby output

Solr has an optional Ruby response format that extends its JSON output in the following ways to allow the response to be safely eval'd by Ruby's interpreter:

• Ruby's single quoted strings are used to prevent possible string exploits
  • \ and ' are the only two characters escaped...
  • unicode escapes not used... data is written as raw UTF-8
• nil used for null
• => used as the key/value separator in maps
  
  

Here is a simple example of how one may query Solr using the Ruby response format:

require 'net/http'

h = Net::HTTP.new('localhost', 8983)
hresp, data = h.get('/solr/select?q=iPod&wt=ruby')
rsp = eval(data)

puts 'number of matches = ' + rsp['response']['numFound'].to_s
#print out the name field for each returned document
rsp['response']['docs'].each { |doc| puts 'name field = ' + doc['name'] }

For simple interactions with Solr, this may be all you need! If you are building complex interactions with Solr, then look at some of the libraries below. Craig L Russell Note: in Ruby 1.9, the encoding of the response may be set to ASCII-8BITS even though Solr responds with UTF-8. See Ruby issue 2567.

Libraries

Active

• RSolr: A lightweight, general purpose client library for Solr.
  • Sunspot: A nice DSL framework for integrating Solr into your models. Built on top of RSolr.
• DelSolr: A Solr wrapper designed to simplify facet and filter queries.
• Blacklight: A popular and well maintained Ruby on Rails framework for building flexible and attractive front-ends to Solr.
  

Inactive

• solr-ruby: Low-level access to Solr from Ruby.
• Flare: A plugin adding faceted browsing, AJAX suggest and more to Rails controllers.
• acts_as_solr: A plugin to add full text search capabilities using Solr to ActiveRecord models. nice acts_as_solr tutorial
• acts_as_background_solr: An extension to acts_as_solr moving more processing to the background.
• Searchable: A Rails plugin that provides search integration with ActiveRecord. (an alternative to acts_as_solr)
  

CategoryQueryResponseWriter