Support for New Record Formats

This page refers to VuFind 2.x and later; use of earlier versions is no longer recommended.

VuFind is currently bundled with a standard indexer (SolrMarc) that handles MARC records quickly and efficently and a flexible XSLT processor for dealing with XML documents. However, VuFind also has the capability to support any other form of metadata if you are willing to do at least one of two things:

• write an indexer to get the data into VuFind's index (necessary!)
• write a “Record Driver” to display that data appropriately within the VuFind interface (optional, if the index-based display meets your needs)

Some general hints on how to create such an indexer are given here.

Writing a custom indexer for other record formats may be done in almost any programming language. Steps to be done:

• parse record format
• map format entities to Solr index fields (see the index schema page for notes on VuFind's index schema; the MARC mappings in import/marc.properties should be helpful for understanding the meaning of the various fields)
• create XMLish document out of these fields (see the Solr Wiki for details)
• POST document to Solr's update handler (FYI: it doesn't have to be a POST per se; you can use SOLR/Lucene APIs to add documents directly to the index which is much faster)

Record display is handled by a family of “Record Driver” classes that extract information from the stored Solr fields and return it through a standard interface. See the Record Drivers page for more details.