We've got a lot of data indexed, and now it's time to actually use Solr for what it is intended to do—searching, also known as querying. When your application interacts with Solr, it will more than likely use HTTP, either directly via common APIs or indirectly through one of Solr's client APIs. However, as we demonstrate Solr's capabilities in this chapter, we'll use Solr's web-based admin interface. In Chapter 1, Quick Starting Solr, we covered the basics of Solr's admin interface. To use the admin query interface, click on the mbartists core link in the left navigation column, and then click Query.

You will see a window as shown in the following screenshot, after clicking on the Query link:

The URL is http://localhost:8983/solr/#/mbartists/query. This form has a subset of the options you might specify to run a search. Let's do a quick search. In the q box, we'll leave the default of *:* (an asterisk, colon, and then another asterisk). Admittedly, that is cryptic if you've never seen it before, but it basically means "match anything in any field", which is to say, it matches all documents. Much more about the query syntax will be discussed soon enough.

Click on the Execute Query button and you'll see XML output appear in the main content area. Now click on the URL at the top of this area to view the full response. You should now see something like this:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<response>
  <lst name="responseHeader">
    <int name="status">0</int>
    <int name="QTime">0</int>
    <lst name="params">
      <str name="q">*:*</str>
      <str name="wt">xml</str>
    </lst>
  </lst>
  <result name="response" numFound="399182" start="0">
    <doc>
      <str name="type">Artist</str>
      <str name="id">Artist:272344</str>
      <str name="a_name">F.D. Project</str>
      <date name="a_release_date_latest">2004-11-30T00:00:00Z</date>
      <date name="indexedAt">2013-01-24T01:05:29Z</date>
    </doc>
    <doc>
      <str name="type">Artist</str>
      <str name="id">Artist:274969</str>
      <str name="a_name">Tempradura</str>
      <date name="indexedAt">2013-01-24T01:05:29Z</date>
    </doc>
    <doc>
      <str name="type">Artist</str>
      <str name="id">Artist:143163</str>
      <str name="a_name">Future Pilot A.K.A. vs. Two Lone Swordsmen</str>
      <date name="indexedAt">2013-01-24T01:05:29Z</date>
    </doc>
    <!--… 7 more documents omitted for brevity -->
  </result>
</response>

{
  "responseHeader": {
    "status": 0,
    "QTime": 38,
    "params": {
      "indent": "true",
      "q": "*:*",
      "wt": "json"
    }
  },
  "response": {     
    "numFound": 399182,
    "start": 0,
    "docs": [
      {"type": "Artist",
      "id": "Artist:272344",
      "a_name": "F.D. Project",
      "a_release_date_latest": "2004-11-30T00:00:00Z",
      "indexedAt": "2013-01-24T01:05:29Z"},
….