Don't forget the leading slash when using SolrJ or SolrMeter with a custom search handler

A custom Solr search handler is quite useful in order to decouple search clients from an Apache Solr server. More specifically, several features can be added transparently for search clients:

• search components
• default and additional parameter values, parameter values that will be used in spite of values provided at request time

Clients access the search handler through the URL path (like http://mySolrUrl/mySearchHandler).

SolrMeter is a stress testing tool and SolrJ is Java client for Apache Solr. It is important not to forget the leading slash for the search handler when accessing a custom search handler with these tools (SolrJ: http://lucene.apache.org/solr/4_6_0/solr-solrj/org/apache/solr/client/solrj/SolrQuery.html#setRequestHandler(java.lang.String)).

Otherwise, the resulting search query is http://mySolrUrl/select?qt=mySearchHandler instead of http://mySolrUrl/mySearchHandler. As of Solr 3.6 the qt parameter is not considered by default anymore and therefore the default select search handler is executed instead of the custom one.