how can I get more error messages out of solrj SolrException - solr

Question

When I send queries to Solr using solrj, I sometimes get SolrException's thrown. When I dig through the exception, it just says "Bad Request", and gives the HTTP return code (which is 400).
When I take the request URL and put it in my browser, I was able to see a richer error message. The browser displays an error message saying one of the fields names is not valid.
I would like to be able to capture this inside my log file. I was able to capture this by copying all the parameters to an Apache HTTP Client POST request (I'm using POST and not GET because GET made the URL too long) and re-executing the request, but this is inefficient. Is there a way to get error message out of SolrException directly?
Here's what I'm doing:
catch (SolrServerException e) {
if(e.getRootCause() instanceof SolrException) {
SolrException ee = (SolrException) e.getRootCause();
HttpClient client = new HttpClient();
PostMethod method = new PostMethod(SOLR_URL);
// copy params over
Iterator<String> iter = request.getParams().getParameterNamesIterator();
while(iter.hasNext()) {
String p = iter.next();
method.setParameter(p, request.getParams().get(p));
}
int statusCode;
try {
// re execute and display the error message
statusCode = client.executeMethod(method);
logger.error(method.getResponseBodyAsString());
} catch (Exception e1) {
// TODO Auto-generated catch block
}
}

Answer 1

These messages aren't available via SolrJ. You can see them in solr's log file, but there is no way to capture them in your client, since solr only returns the 400 error status with a generic message to the client :(