Solr's Geospatial Formatter doesn't work?

Question

I have indexed a document including a SpatialRecursivePrefixTreeFieldType field named 'geo'. I was reading about the Geospatial formatter and wanted to try it but I can't seem to get it to work.

Here is an example document I have indexed:

{
    "geo": "POLYGON((22.376144 -50.055954, 36.013237 -50.055954, 36.013237 -47.949005, 22.376144 -47.949005, 22.376144 -50.055954))",
    "id": "a3ca6c69-acb9-30e6-b1a6-dbfd72917bc8",
    "val_d": 33.067356,
    "_version_": 1541776337602084900,
    "insert_timestamp": "2016-08-04T23:14:54.814Z"
}

And this is the query I am trying:

q=id%3A%22a3ca6c69-acb9-30e6-b1a6-dbfd72917bc8%22&rows=1&fl=*%2C%5Bgeo+f%3Dgeo+w%3DGeoJSON%5D&wt=json&indent=true

In a more readable format:

q=id:"a3ca6c69-acb9-30e6-b1a6-dbfd72917bc8"
rows=1
fl=*,[geo f=geo w=GeoJSON]
wt=json
indent=true

The result I get back is simply the indexed document exactly as I quoted above. I also tried modifying the fl argument to include a key like this fl=*,geojson[geo f=geo w=GeoJSON] but that doesn't work either.

Is there a reason I can't get the formatter to work?

Version info:

• solr-spec: 5.3.1
• solr-impl: 5.3.1 1703449 - noble - 2015-09-17 01:48:15
• lucene-spec: 5.3.1
• lucene-impl: 5.3.1 1703449 - noble - 2015-09-17 01:38:09

Answer 1

The geospatial transformer was added in version 6.1 according to:

https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/SOLR-8814

With minor changes, we can modify the existing JSON writer to produce a GeoJSON FeatureCollection for ever SolrDocumentList. We can then pick a field to use as the geometry type, and use that for the Feature#geometry
"response":{"type":"FeatureCollection","numFound":1,"start":0,"features":[ {"type":"Feature", "geometry":{"type":"Point","coordinates":[1,2]}, "properties":{ ... the normal solr doc fields here ...}}] }}
This will allow adding solr results directly to various mapping clients like Leaflet This patch will work with Documents that have a spatial field the either: 1. Extends AbstractSpatialFieldType 2. has a stored value with geojson 2. has a stored value that can be parsed by spatial4j (WKT, etc) The spatial field is identified with the parameter geojson.field

It is marked as

Fix Version/s: 6.1, master (7.0)

So the answer to the question is; an upgrade to Solr 6.1 is required for the geospatial formatter to work.