How do I index text files, web sites and database in the same Solr schema? All 3 sources are a requirement and I'm trying to figure out how to do it. I did some examples and they're working fine as they're separate from each other, now I need them all to be 1 schema since the user will be searching in all of those 3 data sources.
How should I proceed?
You should sketch up a few notes for each of your content sources:
Once that is done, determine which meta-data you want to make searchable. Some of it might be very specific to just one of the content sources (such as author on web pages, or any given field in a DB row), while others will be present in all sources (such as unique ID, title, text content). Use copy-fields to consolidate fields as needed.
Meta-data will vary greatly from project to project, but yes -- things like update date, filename, and any structured data you can parse out of the text files will surely help you improve relevance. Beyond that, it varies a lot from case to case. Maybe the file paths hint at a (possibly informal) taxonomy you can use as metadata. Maybe filenames contain metadata themselves (such as year, keyword, product names, etc).
Be prepared to use different fields for different sources when displaying results. A source field goes a long way in terms of creating result tiles -- and it might turn out to be your most used facet.
An alternative (and probably preferred) approach to using copy-fields extensively, is using the DisMax/EDisMax request handlers, to facilitate searching in several fields.
Consider using a mix of copy-fields and (e)dismax. For instance, copy all fields into a catch-all text-field, that need not be stored, and include it in searches, but with a low boost-value, and include highly weighted fields (such as title, or headings, or keywords, or filename) in the search. There's a lot of parameters to tweak in dismax, but it's definately worth the effort.