FWIW: Perhaps an XY problem? can you explain more in depth what it is you plan on doing in this search component?
: I can see that Solr calls the component's process() method, but from : within that method, rb.getResponseDocs(); is always null. No matter what : i try, i do not seem to be able to get a hold of that list of response : docs. IIRC getResponseDocs() is only non-null when agregating distributed/cloud resultsfrom multiple shards (where we already have a fully populated SolrDocumentList due to agregating the remote responses), but in a single-node Solr request only a "DocList" is used, and the stored field values are read lazily from the IndexReader by the ResponseWriter. So if you're not writting a distributed component, check ResponseBuilder.getResults() ? Even if you are writting a component for a distributed solr setup, what method you call (and where you call it) depends a lot on when/where you expect your code to run... IIRC: * prepare() runs on every node for every request (original aggregation request and every sub-request to each shard). * distributedProcess runs on the aggregation node, and is called repeatedly for each "stage" requested by any components (so at a minimum once, usually twice to fetch stored fields, maybe more if there are multiple facet refinement phases, etc...). * modifyRequest() & handleResponses() are called on the aggregation node prior/after every sub-request to every shard. * process() is called on each shard for each sub request. * finishStage is called on the aggreation node at the ned of each stage (after all the responses from all shards for that sub-request) ...so something like HighlightComponent does it's main work in the process() method, because it only needs the data for each doc, the impacts of other (aggregated) docs don't affect the results -- then later finishStage combines the results. If you on the otherhand want to look at all of the *final* documents being returned to the user, not on a per-shard basis but on an aggregate basis, you'd want to put that logic in something like finishStage and check for the stage that does a GET_FIELDS -- but if you want your component to *also* work in non-cloud mode, you'd need the same logic in your process() method (looking at the DocList instead of the SolrDocumentList, with a conditional to check for distrib=false so you don't waste a bunch of work on per-shard queries when it is in fact being used in cloud-mode) None of this is very straight forward, but you are admitedly geting int overy advanced expert territory here. -Hoss http://www.lucidworks.com/
