How to make a search on particular node-type?

I think the easiest way to allow just searches for nodes of a particular type would be to edit apachesolr_search_search() in apachesolr_search.module to always append " AND type:story" (with "story" replaced by the type in question, of course).

But a better way would probably be to not even index nodes with the wrong type in the first place. Just change "if ($node->nid) {" to "if ($node->nid && $node->type == 'story') {" in ApacheSolrUpdate:update_index() and reindex the site, that should suffice.

What about for a first iteration if we just provide a text field on the settings page where an admin can specify a fragment of a query which gets appended to each query?

@JacobSingh: I like your idea and it is similar to a use case that I have to meet very soon. The advantage to your idea over what drunken monkey suggested is that we can remove that part of the query before displaying things in the results. We wouldn't want to always have -type:story in the breadcrumb, for example, so we need to remove that before rendering anything. The good news is that the query object is built in a way to handle this. See Solr_Base_Query::add_field(), remove_field(), has_field().

I don't know exactly, what you mean. The module has defined facet blocks to filter by author, type and taxonomy terms, but the basical search functionality is available for all other fields defined in the schema.xml as well (except for body, which is merged into the text field). For example, "comment_count:0" finds all nodes without comments.
But this is rather off topic, so please file another issue for additional questions.

Just add parameter to your search string on the fly like this :

$searchString=$searchString.' type:'.$nodeType

Then, you just need to implement a callback function which calls :

apachesolr_search_search($op = 'search', $keys = $searchString);

hope this will help.

We really need to implement this generically so people don't have the module.

There are plans to implement this via a "save this search as a search form" function. Where you can do a search for type = story and then save that as a new search box / form so the criteria is pre-filled when the users searches.

The best way to do this is not to hack it as mattc suggests (which will totally work), but implement hook_apachesolr_modify_query(). See the source in apachesolr_search for how to implement it. apachesolr_nodeaccess also implements it.

If this works, please close this issue.