Sarnia breaking my entire site after setting up sarnia - oracle solr connection

Hi,

I am trying to use Sarnia + Search API + Search API Solr to retrieve search results from a solr server that indexes "people" from an oracle database. We are trying to create a directory of users within this one website, but the data is constantly changing and is stored in another more secure oracle system.

I have my oracle database indexed in solr and it works exactly like we need it do. I can search by the users first name, last name, email, employee id, and much more. So the solr side of things are good.

That being said, I have tried to use Sarnia + Search API + Search API Solr like some people suggested. Unfortunately, everytime I enable my new search server, it breaks my entire site completely with this error:

SearchApiException: Unknown or invalid item type . in search_api_get_datasource_controller() (line 1278 of/afs/asu.edu/it/drupal/dev/wsi/sites/all/modules/contrib/search_api/search_api.module).

The only way to get the site back up, is to flush the search api & sarnia tables & cache tables.

The thing is, after I create the sarnia server is the UI, I can see it connected to solr and it even recognizes my custom field names, I can see them in the UI. The moment I leave the sarnia UI pages though, it breaks my entire drupal site? I have searched for this error, and some other people experienced it with the UUID module, but we aren't even using that?

To me, the error suggests it is having a problem handling the custom result data being returned to the search api module. I thought Sarnia was supposed to handle that?

I really appreciate any help.

Also, we are using a *ton* of contributed modules on this site....

Thanks!