Sitecore Suggest No suggester named default was configured

Recently I was testing out SOLR’s suggester functionality through the  Sitecore API. There is a slight gap in the documentation and I kept receiving the error No suggester named default was configured.

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<response>
   <lst name="responseHeader">
      <int name="status">400</int>
      <int name="QTime">22</int>
   </lst>
   <lst name="error">
      <lst name="metadata">
         <str name="error-class">org.apache.solr.common.SolrException</str>
         <str name="root-error-class">org.apache.solr.common.SolrException</str>
      </lst>
      <str name="msg">No suggester named default was configured</str>
      <int name="code">400</int>
   </lst>
</response>

 

This error is caused because the Response Handler does not know which dictionary to use. This can be resolve in two ways:

 

Option 1 Specify the dictionary in the request handler. Once this change has been made you must reload the SOLR core

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<requestHandler name="/suggest" class="solr.SearchHandler" startup="lazy">
   <lst name="defaults">
      <str name="suggest.dictionary">mySuggester</str>
      <str name="suggest">true</str>
      <str name="suggest.count">10</str>
   </lst>
   <arr name="components">
      <str>suggest</str>
   </arr>
</requestHandler>

 

Option 2 Add the dictionary into the parameters

 
using (IProviderSearchContext context = index.CreateSearchContext())
{
    SolrSuggestQuery q = searchtext;
    var options = new SuggestHandlerQueryOptions
    {
        Parameters = new SuggestParameters
        {
            Count = 3,
            Build = true,
            <strong>Dictionary = "mySuggester"</strong>
        }
    };
    var result = context.Suggest(q, options);
    var suggestions = result.Suggestions["mySuggester"].Suggestions.Select(x =&amp;gt; x.Term);
}

Further Reading
https://doc.sitecore.com/developers/90/platform-administration-and-architecture/en/using-solr-auto-suggest.html

https://lucene.apache.org/solr/guide/6_6/suggester.html#Suggester-LookupImplementations