There still may be a bug that Ryan mentioned about unknown fields simply being ignored, but that should be fixed if true.
I just looked into this - /trunk code is fine. I wasn't noticing the errors because the response code is always 200 with an error included in the xml. My code was only checking errors on non-200 response codes Is there enough general interest in having error response codes to change the standard web.xml config to let the SolrDispatchFilter handle /select? <init-param> <param-name>handle-select</param-name> <param-value>true</param-value> </init-param>