react-solr-connector

A React component which provides access to a Solr server. Suitable for use in simple React apps which do not make use of a state management framework like Redux. Since the component uses the Solr JSON API, only versions from 5 onward are supported (and I have only tested with 6.0.0).

Installation

Install the module with npm:

npm install --save react-solr-connector

Using the component

The module exports one default object, SolrConnector. This should be used to wrap your application components:

import SolrConnector from 'react-solr-connector';
...
<SolrConnector searchParams={searchParams}>
  <MyApp/>
</SolrConnector>

SolrConnector injects a solrConnector prop into all of its immediate children. This is an object with the structure:

{
  searchParams,
  busy,
  response,
  error
}

SolrConnector is passed a prop called searchParams (which is also copied into the injected solrConnector prop). If searchParams contains a non-empty query then the search is performed asynchronously and busy is set to true (this could be used to indicate to the user that a search is in progress, for example by displaying a spinner). response is null until a response from Solr is received, at which point it is set to the value of the response object from Solr (including the responseHeader, the main response object, and any facets, highlighting objects, etc.) busy is also set to false. If an error occurs, the error property is set (to a descriptive string) instead of the response property. A search is performed when the component first mounts, and thereafter any time it receives new props.

searchParams must have the following properties as a minimum:

{
  solrSearchUrl,
  query
}

Where query is the user-entered query string and solrSearchUrl is a Solr search endpoint, e.g.:

http://localhost:8983/solr/techproducts/select

If you are serving the app from a different host then you will have to enable CORS on Solr, or use a proxy service.

Optional properties for doSearch are:

{
  offset,
  limit,
  filter,
  fetchFields,
  facet,
  highlightParams
}

Most of these correspond exactly with properties in the Solr JSON API. The exceptions are fetchFields, which corresponds to the Solr fields (which is not a very clear name in my opinion) and highlightParams. In fact, highlightParams can contain any of the "traditional" Solr params that the JSON API does not currently support, but highlighting is the most obvious application.

Running tests

If you have cloned the react-solr-connector GitHub repository, you can run the jest tests with the following commands:

$ npm install
$ npm tests

Running the demo

To run the simple demo, install Solr 6 and start it with the techproducts example:

$ bin/solr start -e techproducts

then start the Webpack demo server:

$ npm start

and point your browser at http://localhost:8080/demo/index.html.