Getting Started With Synapticloop Panl
A rather pleasing companion to the Apache® Solr® Faceted Search Engine.

[1] 'Sensibly' is a bit of a vague term... Panl strips out any unexpected characters and ensures that it is valid.  For example, if Solr (and therefore) Panl is expecting an integer parameter and the value 5gs6 is passed through, Panl will remove any non-numeric characters and parse the number - returning 56.  For values that cannot be converted, the value will be ignored and not passed through to the Solr server.

[2] Thanks for checking out this footnote.

[3] A LPSE length of 3 with the five mandatory codes would provide 185,193 facets, a length of 4 would provide 10,556,001

[4] A LPSE length of 3 with the five mandatory codes and one optional code would provide 175,616 facets, a length of 4 would provide 9,834,496

[5] Examples with specific dates are notoriously hard to put into examples as by the time you read this book, the example dates will be well out of range.  There is an example data set (simple-date) which is included within the release package which has random dates spanning 2014 to 2032 which can be used to test out the features, however you will need to index the data set with separate commands.

[6] This is probably not the fairest of comparisons, as a lot of the underlying Solr query implementation could be hidden behind the scenes anyhow.  However, what Panl can do is automatically have CaFUPs for multiple FieldSets, facets, and queries which will automatically build the query, the returned facets, the fields, and more.

[7] The exception to this rule are any defined OR facets, which will increase the number of results that are returned.

[8] The example data 'techproducts' included with the Apache Solr instance is a reasonable test dataset, however, the way the schema and collections are designed places an emphasis more on testing ingestion and searching, rather than on a functional search set.

[9] I am using an Apple Mac system, but it is the same for Linux.

[10] Commands weren't included in this as a recursive force (i.e. rm -rf or rmdir /S /Q) deletion of directories can be a very dangerous thing.

[11] Historically, Java based examples for servers seem to have been based on the ubiquitous Pet Store, time for something new.

[12] Or, the mistakes that were made with the implementation.

[13] At the time of writing no useful results were returned by any of the large search engines for 'Solr Panl'.

[14] In some instances, the properties file layout would have been better suited to JSON, however, comments are not allowed in JSON files, which makes explaining the file a lot harder.  Admittedly, HJSON could have been used, and parsed on the way into Panl, but this would reduce portability - sigh - these are the decisions which can reverberate through time and code.

[15] This started off as a simple way to test the Panl configuration and how it interacted with the Solr search server, over time, it became a little more complex.  It also became an incredibly useful tool when adding features to the returned JSON object so that integration and implementation became a more developer friendly experience.

[16] Once again, a simple explainer turned into a more complex application as time and requirements became more involved.

[17]Admittedly this is rather annoying having to know the value ranges ahead of time, however there are some niceties built into Panl to use the minimum and maximum values.

[18]Once again, annoying to have to know the values.

[19] Although German users should be fine with the default implementation from Panl.