Fredhopper Discovery Platform 26.3.0 is fully compatible with the previous release, FAS 26.2.0.

No special actions are required when upgrading from FAS 26.2.0 to FAS 26.3.0.

Lucene upgrade

This release includes an upgrade to Apache Lucene 9.12.3.

• No immediate re-index is required after upgrading, as Lucene 9.x continues to support index formats created with Lucene 8.x.

• Existing indexes will continue to function without changes.

Warning: If you downgrade from FAS 26.3.0 to FAS 26.2.0, a full re-index is required. This is due to the Lucene version change (FAS 26.3.0 → Lucene 9.x and FAS 26.2.0 → Lucene 8.x). Lucene 8.x cannot read indexes created or modified by Lucene 9.x.

Search and language processing changes

The following updates have been made to stemming and tokenization components:

German stem filters

• GermanStemFilterPorter2 (ID: german-stem-filter-porter-2)
  is now equivalent to GermanStemFilterPorter1 (ID: german-stem-filter-porter-1).

• Both filters now use Lucene’s:

  • org.tartarus.snowball.ext.GermanStemmer

Czech stem filter

• CzechStemFilter (ID: czech-stem-filter) now uses:

  • Lucene’s Light Stemmer for Czech (CzechStemmer)

• The following modes are no longer supported:

  • LIGHT

  • AGGRESSIVE

English stem filter (Lovins)

• EnglishStemFilterLovins (ID: english-stem-filter-lovins) is now an alias of EnglishStemmer.

Note: This filter was not detected in production use and has been simplified.

IKTokenizer removal

• IKTokenizer (ID: ik-tokenizer) has been removed because it depended on an unsupported third-party library tied to Lucene 8.5 (https://github.com/magese/ik-analyzer-solr/)

Note: This tokenizer was not found to be used in production environments.

Logging improvements

An issue causing excessive logging in fredhopper.log has been resolved.

Customers with:

• Conflation strategies containing a large number of possible values, or

• Automatically generated multi-site-config.xml files (e.g. via Jarola)

could experience excessive logging due to repeated attempts to fetch non-existent attributes. The underlying issue has been fixed in this release.

Note: Monitor logging levels after upgrade if your setup matches the above scenario. Periodically re-create the multi-site-config.xml file to reduce unnecessary attribute lookups and improve overall performance and log clarity.