I'll try to make this as short as possible. We have a ColdFusion site that uses Solr to index several thousand PDFs. Part of the index information is also stored in a database, which is used to help filter the results. The search page is broken up into a keyword field, country select, publication select, and region select.
Right now the only piece of data that is used to search the Solr collection is the keyword value. We've limited the max rows to 250. So when a user enters a fairly common word, a lot of the time the system is returning more than 250 records, which are then filtered down by a database query. However, in these cases the user is not seeing all of the documents they should because a common word, like BBQ can easily show up in thousands of documents.
I've been searching for several hours on how to create a more refined crireria for Solr without much luck. I found this page at Adobe, https://helpx.adobe.com/coldfusion/developing-applications/accessing-and-using-data/solr-search-support/solr-search-examples.html, but it doesn't show any complex examples.
What I would like to do is be able to pass cfsearch the keyword, the country, the publication, and the region so the list of documents is as small as possible. One of the problems is whoever setup the index did not take advantage of category, category tree, subject, or even keywords fields (most records seem to be empty for these fields). I've tried using the field syntax of title:value and key:value and url:value; key and value are the only fields available to me that contain the criteria I'm looking for. To make matters worse the user can set multiple criteria before searching. So I essentially end up with an array of values that I have to parse.
I also found out that Solr defaults to an OR search and I need a way to specify one or the other based on the user input; parens would be a nice way to handle that. I don't think I want to mess around with the xml file and potentially change the default Solr search for everyone.
Does anyone know of a way to pass cfsearch/Solr a keyword (using the + sign), the country, publication, and region values? Something like this: "+BBQ AND url:/#country#/* AND url:/#publication#/* AND url:/#region#/*".