Change the wording of the generic "Apache Solr server unavailable" error message [#1732900]

The generic "Apache Solr server unavailable error" message suggests that there is an issue with the Apache Solr service, however there are numerous reasons other than the Solr server being down when this error is deiplayed. Although the detailed messages are logged via watchdog, the message displayed on the search page leads people to make judgements and post error reports to their administrators that their Solr server is down when there is some other application level error either on the module or server side that is causing the issue.

A couple of possible suggestions to consider, very open to others:

Change the message displayed to end users to something more generic
Optionally display the detailed error message via drupal_set_message() to users with the "administer search permissions"

Comment	File	Size	Author
#11	error-message-1732900-11-D6.patch	2.09 KB	pwolanin
#7	error-message-1732900-7.patch	1.98 KB	cpliakas

Comments

Comment #1

cpliakas commented 15 August 2012 at 16:07

Title:

Change the wording of the generic "Apache Solr server unavailable error" message

» Change the wording of the generic "Apache Solr server unavailable" error message

Fixing quotes in title.

Comment #2

pwolanin commented 15 August 2012 at 22:21

I thought at some point we did have an option to show extra info to admins - maybe we should see if that got broken, or needs to be expanded.

Comment #3

cpliakas commented 16 August 2012 at 00:25

@pwolanin, I definitely could have missed something, but the only thing I can see is the "Extra help messages for administrators" options which only adds notices to a page whenever Drupal changed content that needs reindexing.

Comment #4

pwolanin commented 16 August 2012 at 14:03

Ok, I was thinking of that option, but not remembering what it does - we could maybe use that as the flag?

Comment #5

cpliakas commented 16 August 2012 at 14:22

Yes, that seems very reasonable to me. As a side note, I still think we should reconsider the wording of the error message as well. I understand it can be overridden in settings.php, but since it is more of an end user-facing message, I'm not sure it is the best option to mention things like "Apache Solr" and "Server". Maybe saying something even more generic like "search is currently unavailable" or something similar, that would be OK if we coupled it with the detailed information using the technique you mentioned. If we agree that this is the right path forward and can also agree on a message, I don't mind taking a crack at a patch.