This week I worked with a user who was having an interesting issue with Solr-based searches under ColdFusion. He was trying to make use of "boosting", which is a way of saying that a match found in one field should be considered more important than another. So for example, imagine you have a collection of articles. The user searches for N and you want to ensure that if the title includes N it is rated higher. Normally Solr is going to use it's own judgement. It may say, for example, that if N occurs a crap load in the body then it should be rated higher than an article with N in the title. While that logic makes sense, Solr does allow you to weigh different fields higher if you want. Normally the syntax should be something like this:

#search# OR title:#search#^10

However, in testing with the user, this didn't seem to work consistently. And then I noticed something odd. For our testing, we were using "ColdFusion" as a search string. While I tested I once did "coldfusion" and noticed that a record that should not have been returned wasn't. I hit up my Solr expert, Shannon Hicks for help. Together we found that the Solr configuration ColdFusion creates sets title as a case sensitive field. That's important to know in general, but certainly impacted our tests here.

So the fix? I simply had the user employ one of the custom fields as a copy of the title field. Once done we could then do:

#search# OR custom1:#search#^10

And it worked immediately. I hope this is helpful!