Drupal's file handling capabilities keep getting better. Beyond the core upload module, the filefield module for CCK has enabled us to build sites with all sorts of files; documents, images, music, videos, and so forth. Searching within these docuements, however, has never been a common feature on Drupal sites. Some solutions have existed, particularly for extracting texts from PDFs and common wordprocessing documents. With Apache Solr, the attachments module, and an extension library called Tika, things can be much better. With Tika you can extract texts not only from Microsoft Office, Open Office, and PDF documents, you can also get text and metadata from images, songs, Flash movies and zipped archives. Searching for these texts is done as part of the normal Apache Solr driven site search.

For the last six months, Scott Reynolds has been keeping a big juicy secret. As the maintainer of the Apache Solr Views module, he knows just how cool the future of Drupal Search is going to be. His module, based on an idea and code from Thomas Seidl, lets you make custom searches against the Solr index the same way you currently make views against the MySQL database.

UPDATE: If you're working with the DRUPAL-6--2 branch please see the updated code example below.

In this article I will show you how you can write a tiny bit of code that will reveal new fields and facets for searching with the ApacheSolr module and Acquia Search. Using Acquia Drupal we'll write an example module that takes the file type from CCK file and image fields and makes them into their own search fields. This results in us being able to filter our search results based on file type. This code fulfils the situation where you want, for example, to find a specific post that has a JPEG image, or all of the posts with PDFs that match a particular keyword.

Last week Acquia sent me to New Orleans to be a speaker at Lullabot's Do it With Drupal conference. The conference went very well and I gave a presentation about ApacheSolr, and how faceted search will change the way you think about finding things on your site. Since Acquia recently announced that we will be launching a hosted Solr search service even more people have shown interest in ApacheSolr.

The search technology area is highly important to people with websites. As a result, I've spent serious time looking at it. Several things have come from this time spent:

• The important thing: We'll soon be adding "hosted site search" capabilities to the Acquia Network for our subscribers. More about this below.
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