Struggling with learning solr - solr

Question

I am in the process of redesigning one of our companies site. My boss wants to play around with the idea of replacing all of our navigation with a search box.. the search box should be able to query any of our tables of unrelated data.
So right now I am trying it with 5 tables.
Products
Manufacturers
Category
Ingredients
Uses
So should be able to lookup a product name, a manufacturer name, a category name, an ingredient name, or a use name
When I retrieve the results. if the user clicked on a manufacturer search result.. It will take them to a manufacturer page that lookups all products for that manufacturer.
When clicks on a product page.. link will take them to that actual product information.
Ingredient will take them to a page that will show all products containing that ingredient.
Anyways here is my data config
<dataConfig>
<dataSource driver="com.mysql.jdbc.Driver" url="jdbc:mysql://localhost:3306/xxx" user="xxx" password="xxx" />
<document>
<entity name="manufacturer" transformer="TemplateTransformer" pk="manNum"
query="SELECT manNum, manName FROM manufacturer
WHERE active = 1">
<field column="id" name="id" template="MAN-${manNum}" />
<field column="type" template="manufacturer" name="type"/>
<field column="manName" name="text"/>
<field column="manNum" name="manNum"/>
</entity>
<entity name="product" transformer="TemplateTransformer"
query="SELECT products.prodNum, products.prodName as text, m.manName FROM products JOIN man m USING (manNum)
WHERE products.active = 1
AND (hideWeb = 0 or hideWeb IS NULL)">
<field column="id" template="PROD-${products.prodNum}" name="id"/>
<field column="type" template="product" name="type"/>
<field column="text" name="text"/>
<field column="manName" name="manName"/>
</entity>
<entity name="ingredients" transformer="TemplateTransformer" pk="id"
query="SELECT id, text FROM inglist WHERE sort != ''">
<field column="id" name="id" template="ING-${inglist.id}"/>
<field column="type" template="ingredient" name="type"/>
<field column="text" name="text" />
</entity>
<entity name="uses" transformer="TemplateTransformer" pk="id"
query="SELECT id, text FROM useslist">
<field column="id" name="id" template="USE-${id}"/>
<field column="type" template="use" name="type"/>
<field column="text" name="text"/>
</entity>
<entity name="categories" transformer="TemplateTransformer" pk="id"
query="SELECT id, textShow as text FROM categorylist">
<field column="id" name="id" template="CATEGORY-${id}"/>
<field column="type" template="category" name="type"/>
<field column="text" name="text"/>
</entity>
</document>
</dataConfig>
And my schema..
<fields>
<field name="id" type="string" indexed="true" stored="true"/>
<field name="text" indexed="true" stored="true" type="text"/>
<field name="type" type="string" indexed="false" stored="true"/>
<field name="manName" type="text" indexed="false" stored="true"/>
<field name="manNum" type="string" indexed="false" stored="false"/>
</fields>
Now perhaps I am not doing this the right way... and there may be a better way to handle this.
Anyways the problem I am running into right now is that I am getting the error missing required field "id". Now products query and manufacturer query does not have an id column in the select.. but I thought the transform query should take care of it? If I do the select prodNum as id .. then all the ids are overwritting each other.
Now I could probably concat it in the actual query.. and will do so as a last resort, but would like to know what I am doing wrong with this solution.
EDIT
Nevermind, it was just a noob issue, for some reason I was thinking that the template variable was refering to the table name in the SQL not the entity name,
So I replaced all of the
With
And it worked.

Answer 1

Prefixing the table-specific ID with a distinct character or string is a good idea. I do it in the SQL, which allows me to check the behavior outside of Solr.
select
concat('b',cast(b.id as char)) as id,
...

Answer 2

It Was a noob issue,
for some reason I was thinking that the template variable was refering to the table name in the SQL not the entity name.

Answer 3

I do it like this:
<entity name="GG-Boryslaw-1939-Phonebook"
transformer="TemplateTransformer,DateFormatTransformer"
pk="id"
query="SELECT * FROM boryslaw_1939_phonebook">
<field column="record_id" template="GG-Boryslaw-1939-Phonebook-${GG-Boryslaw-1939-Phonebook.id}" />
<field column="record_type" template="phonebook" />
<field column="record_source" template="Boryslaw Phonebook (1939)" />
<field column="record_date" template="${GG-Boryslaw-1939-Phonebook.Year}" dateTimeFormat="yyyy" />
...etc...
</entity>