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Migration: removing SOLR and Register/Schema publishing

This release removes two deprecated subsystems from OpenRegister:

  1. The SOLR search index and the entire external search backend abstraction (including the Elasticsearch backend). Full-text search, faceting, and aggregation now run exclusively on the built-in database (Magic-Tables / PostgreSQL) path.
  2. Register/Schema publishing — the published/depublished columns and the publish/depublish UI. Anonymous visibility of registers and schemas is now decided entirely by RBAC.

Both removals are BREAKING. This guide describes the operator actions required so nothing silently breaks after upgrading.

1. SOLR / external search backend​

No data migration is required: the SOLR index was a derived copy of data that already lives in the database. After upgrading:

  • Remove the solr (and zookeeper) services from your deployment — they are no longer used. The docker compose solr profile and resources/solr/ configsets have been removed from the app.
  • The search_backend configuration value is ignored; the active backend is always database.
  • The following HTTP endpoints have been removed and now return 404: /api/settings/solr*, /api/solr/* (collections, configsets, fields, dashboard, setup, manage), /api/settings/solr-info, /api/settings/solr-facet-config, and the SOLR-backed file endpoints (/api/solr/warmup/files, /api/solr/files/*, /api/search/files/keyword, /api/files/chunks/process, /api/files/chunks/stats).
  • In-process semantic/hybrid vector search (PostgreSQL pgvector) is unchanged; its endpoints (/api/search/files/semantic, /api/search/files/hybrid, /api/settings/search/semantic|hybrid, /api/objects/vectorize/*, /api/vectors/test-embedding, …) keep working.

Note: SOLR's relevance ranking (BM25/TF-IDF) is gone. Database search uses ILIKE/pg_trgm matching without relevance scoring.

2. Register / Schema publishing → RBAC​

The published/depublished columns on the registers and schemas tables are dropped by migration Version1Date20260624000000. Previously, a register or schema was visible to anonymous callers when it had a published timestamp (and was not depublished).

Anonymous visibility is now expressed as an RBAC rule on the entity's authorization block: a register or schema is anonymously readable when its authorization.read grants access to the public group.

Required operator action​

For every register or schema that was previously published and must stay publicly readable, add public to its read authorization before or right after upgrading. Minimal form:

{
  "authorization": {
    "read": ["public"]
  }
}

To express a time-based publication window (the equivalent of a future published date), use the RBAC $now dynamic variable against a date property on the object — the same pattern the object-level deprecation established:

{
  "authorization": {
    "read": [
      { "group": "public", "match": { "publicatiedatum": { "$lte": "$now" } } }
    ]
  }
}

There is no automated data migration of publication state into RBAC rules: the intended audience of a previously-published resource cannot be inferred safely, so operators add the rule explicitly.

Rollback: the column-drop migration is destructive. It is sequenced as the last deploy step so application code can be reverted independently before the columns are dropped. After the columns are dropped, restoring them requires a database backup.

3. File auto-share: autoPublish → autoShare​

The schema/property config key autoPublish conflated object publishing (now removed) with Nextcloud file sharing. The file auto-share behaviour is preserved under a new, file-scoped key: autoShare.

  • Rename any schema or property file-config "autoPublish": true to "autoShare": true to keep auto-creating a public share for uploaded files.
  • autoPublish is no longer read for any purpose. A schema still carrying autoPublish simply stops auto-sharing and logs a one-time deprecation warning naming autoShare.
  • This is a manual, documented rename — there is no automated config rewrite.