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Processor Recommendations

When to Use

Use this when deciding which processors to enable for your Search API index.

Decision

By backend:

Processor Database Solr Why
Entity status Enable Enable Always — skip unpublished
Content access Enable if restricted Enable if restricted Access control — NOT default
HTML filter Enable Enable Strip tags, element boosts
Ignore case Enable Disable Solr handles natively
Tokenizer Enable Disable Solr handles natively, better
Stemmer Enable Disable Solr has language-specific stemmers
Stopwords Enable Disable Solr has language-specific lists
Transliteration Enable Optional Accent normalization
Highlight Enable Enable Show search excerpts
Rendered item Optional Optional Render entity for indexing
Aggregated fields Optional Optional Combine multiple fields
Type boost Optional Optional Boost by entity/bundle type

Pattern

23 built-in processors grouped by category:

Category Processors
Content transformation html_filter, ignorecase, tokenizer, stemmer, stopwords, transliteration, ignore_character
Field generation rendered_item, aggregated_field, custom_value, add_url, add_hierarchy, reverse_entity_references
Access & filtering content_access, role_access, entity_status, role_filter
Relevance type_boost, number_field_boost, highlight
Utility entity_type, language_with_fallback

Common Mistakes

  • Wrong: Enabling Tokenizer, Stemmer, Stopwords, Ignore case on Solr → Right: Causes redundant processing and can conflict with Solr's analyzer chain. Disable them.
  • Wrong: Not enabling Content access → Right: Search API does NOT restrict access by default. Without this processor, restricted content appears in results for all users.
  • Wrong: Enabling Highlight on high-traffic pages → Right: Can add 10x latency. Use query tag search_api_skip_processor_highlight to skip selectively.

See Also