Mixing simple and nested docs in same update?

[Jan Høydahl]

Hi,

We index several large nested documents. We found that querying the data 
behaves differently depending on how the documents are indexed.

To reproduce:

solr start
solr create -c nested
# Index one plain document, “friend" and a nested one, “mother” and “daughter”, 
in same request:
curl localhost:8983/solr/nested/update -d ‘
 <add>
   <doc>
     <field name="id">friend</field>
     <field name="type">other</field>
   </doc>
   <doc>
     <field name="id">mother</field>
     <field name="type">parent</field>
     <doc>
       <field name="id">daughter</field>
       <field name="type">child</field>
     </doc>
   </doc>
 </add>'

# Query for mother’s children using either child transformer or child query 
parser
curl 
"localhost:8983/solr/a/query?q=id:mother&fl=%2A%2C%5Bchild%20parentFilter%3Dtype%3Aparent%5D”
{
  "responseHeader":{
    "zkConnected":true,
    "status":0,
    "QTime":4,
    "params":{
      "q":"id:mother",
      "fl":"*,[child parentFilter=type:parent]"}},
  "response":{"numFound":1,"start":0,"docs":[
      {
        "id":"mother",
        "type":["parent"],
        "_version_":1589249812802306048,
        "type_str":["parent"],
        "_childDocuments_":[
        {
          "id":"friend",
          "type":["other"],
          "_version_":1589249812729954304,
          "type_str":["other"]},
        {
          "id":"daughter",
          "type":["child"],
          "_version_":1589249812802306048,
          "type_str":["child"]}]}]
  }}

As you can see, the “friend” got included as a child of “mother”.
If you index the exact same request, putting “friend” after “mother” in the xml,
the query works as expected.

Inspecting the index, everything looks correct, and only “daughter” and 
“mother” have _root_=mother.
Is there a rule that you should start a new update request for each type of 
parent/child relationship
that you need to index, and not mix them in the same request?

--
Jan Høydahl, search solution architect
Cominvent AS - www.cominvent.com