"Solr Response: Bad Request"

We commonly see a 400 "Bad Request" response in these situations:

Syntactically incorrect queries

Syntactical problem with a query. For example, acts_as_solr is known not to escape exclamation points. Other mal-formed queries will also cause a 400 Bad Request from Solr. In these cases, you may refer to the control panel at http://websolr.com/ where you can see error logs for your index.

Misconfigured custom schema

Configuration problems with the schema.xml for the index. This can happen from providing a custom schema.xml that doesn't work on our systems, and can be difficult to debug as we have to look through the logs for you in order to find the problem.

If you suspect this may be affecting you, please open a ticket at http://help.websolr.com/ and let us know the URL to your index ("WEBSOLR_URL" for Heroku applications) so we can help you track down your problem.

Unconfigured index

This one applies to Rails applications using our websolr-acts_as_solr or websolr-sunspot_rails gems.

Because we support both acts_as_solr and Sunspot, our configuration gems report back to Websolr when the application starts, letting us know which client you are using. We then update your index with the corresponding schema.xml for that client.

However, we have seen cases where the gem doesn't load correctly, never phones home, and thus the index never gets configured. In these cases, you can manually update your Solr client at http://websolr.com/