SolrNet 0.2.3 beta1

Just released SolrNet 0.2.3 beta1. Here's the changelog:

• Fixed minor date parsing bug
• Added support for field collapsing
• Added support for date-faceting
• Upgraded to Ninject trunk
• Upgraded sample app's Solr to nightly
• Added StatsComponent support
• Added index-time document boosting
• Added query-time document boosting
• Bugfix: response parsing was not fully culture-independent
• All exceptions are now serializable
• Fixed potential timeout issue
• NHibernate integration
• Fixed Not() query operator returning wrong type

These are the interesting new features:

Field collapsing

This is a very cool feature that isn't even included in the Solr trunk. It's currently only available as a patch, but hopefully it will make its way to trunk soon. It allows you to filter query results based on a document field, thus making a flexible duplicate detection.

StatsComponent

This one is a Solr 1.4 feature (currently only available from trunk or nightly builds). Like the name says, it gives you statistics about your numeric fields within your query results. The statistics are: min, max, sum, count, missing (i.e. no value), sum of squares, mean, standard deviation. The cool thing about this is that you can facet it, thus getting separate stats for each value of the field.

Date faceting

This allows you to trigger faceting based on date ranges, i.e. you can create a facet for each day from 8/1/2009 to 9/1/2009.

NHibernate integration

This is similar to the NHibernate.Search project. It synchronizes a database with Solr (if the Solr document fields are similar to a NHibernate entity fields) and it allows you to issue Solr queries from a regular NHibernate ISession (well, actually a ISession wrapper). You can see more details about its usage in the wiki.

Contributors to this release: Derek Watson, Matt Mondok, Juuso Kosonen.

Get it here:

• Binaries
• Sample app

I'll probably call this a GA release in a couple of weeks if there aren't any serious bugs and once I get the wiki updated.

P.S.: I'll take this opportunity to clear some things up about the project. SolrNet started, like many open source projects, as a way to scratch my own itch. But in the last few months, it has grown beyond that. As a result, I don't have a use for many new features so I am not so motivated to implement them and I don't have any chance to test them in the wild to iron out any bugs and to make sure they are release-quality. This means that I need help from the community (yes, that includes you! ;-) in the form of:

• patches for new features, bugfixes, documentation, code samples
• bug reports
• feature requests
• general suggestions (e.g. "it would be cooler to do x like this instead of how it's currently done")
• voting for issues you consider important/useful in http://code.google.com/p/solrnet/issues/list might boost their priority.
• general usage feedback (e.g. "we've been using SolrNet for 3 months now at www.example.com. The features we especially use are: facets, ninject module, more like this")

Trunk is very stable, right now there are 368 tests that cover around 80% of the code. I strongly encourage you to get new builds from the build server (see artifacts links) and let me know how it works out for you (both positive and negative constructive feedback are useful).

Finally, I could offer some basic commercial support if you need some feature urgently and don't have the resources to code it.