How not to parse search queries

While I remember, I have uploaded the slides from my talk about Solr and Perl at the London Perl Workshop.

This talk was inspired by having seen and contributed to at least five different sets of Solr search code at my current job, all of which (I now believe) were doing it wrong. I distilled this hard-won knowledge into a 20 minute talk, which - funny story - I actually delivered twice to work around a cock-up in the printed schedule. I don't believe any video was successfully taken, but I may be proved wrong later.

I have also uploaded the Parse::Yapp grammar mentioned in the talk.

In case you don't have time to read the slides, the right way to present Solr via Perl is to use the 'edismax' parser, and write your code a bit like this:

my $solr = WebService::Solr->new($url);
my $s = $query->param('q');

# WebService::Solr::Query objects are useful for
# 'fq' params, but avoid them for main 'q' param.
my $options = {
 fq => [WebService::Solr::Query->new(...)];
};

$solr->search($s, \%options);

The key thing here is not to put any complicated parsing code in between the user and Solr. Avoid Search::QueryParser at all costs.