Indexing User Profiles

We're currently working on a way to add user profiles to the search index.

Right now, the architecture of Solr really only allows one schema per solr instance, which right now is basically only for nodes.

If you aren't using usernode (we're not and can't go back to it), it provides a dill of a pickle on how to add index for users and any profile fields. Ideally we want if a user searches for "John Smith" that the first link (most relevant) would be a returned document for their userprofile (link to it, full name, and any profile fields we add to the schema to be searchable)

Right now, the only (relatively simple way) we can come up with to do this is to add some modification in the index update / retrieval functions that would:

- instead of creating an integer nid field for the solr index, create a string nid field
- the string could be appended like "node_234" and "userprofile_234" to avoid collisions
- the stripping and converting of the node_ and userprofile_ parts and back to integers would be really easy
- depending on whether the result was node_ or userprofile_ could determine how the results are presented (i.e. link to userprofile or standard search result linking to a node)

Anyone's thought's on this approach? Solr is great but its limits in one schema per solr instance is crummy. There are some patches to solr to run multi solr cores but that gets uglier (merging of results, multiple core searches)

If it seems a good approach we'll try it and provide some patches.