ColdFusion collection / search won't populate - coldfusion

Question

I am new to using cfcollection and cfsearch, but I gave it a go and it seemed to work. Then, I purged the collection and it stopeed working. I then, decided that I would delete the collection and start over. The collection deleted fine, but now the same code won't return any results.
My query returns 5 results that the collection and subsequent search should be picking up, but the returned search is empty, even when I specify a wildcard * in my criteria.
Is there anything wrong with my code below? No errors or anything, just blank results.
public void function ajax() {
param name="params.keywords" default="SoundCloud";
onlyProvides("json");
local.collectionPath = expandPath( "./" ) & "collections/";
// Delete
/*
collection
action="delete"
collection="pincollection"
path="#local.collectionPath#";
*/
collection
action="list"
name="local.collectionList";
local.collectionList = valueList(collectionList.name);
if ( ! listFind(local.collectionList, "pincollection") ) {
collection
action="create"
collection="pincollection"
engine="solr"
categories="yes"
path="#local.collectionPath#";
}
local.pins = model("pin").findAll(
include = "user",
order = "createdat DESC"
);
index
collection="pincollection"
action="update"
type="custom"
title="title"
body="description"
custom1="latitude"
custom2="longitude"
custom3="typeid"
custom4="createdAt"
custom5="updatedAt"
query="local.pins"
category="typeid"
key="id";
search
name="local.pinSearch"
collection="pincollection"
contextHighlightBegin="<strong>"
contextHighlightEnd="</strong>"
category="2,1"
maxrows="100"
criteria="•";
writeDump(var=local.pinSearch); // Empty search query.
writeDump(var=local.pins, abort=true); // Original query returns 5 results.
renderWith(data=local.pinSearch, layout=false);
}
I am using Railo.
I can see that in my collections folder, a folder for my collection has been created, but this does not contain any files.
I'm a newbie at using ColdFusion / Railo for search. It seems straight-forward, but I'm stumped.
Thanks,
Mikey.
PS - I am using CFWheels, hence some CFWheels specific functions. These can be ignored.

Answer 1

Before you go too far with troubleshooting this, consider switching to a dedicated Solr server if you can. We quickly hit the limits of Solr in CF9 years ago and used the CFSolrLib project by Shannon Hicks to connect to a fresh install of Solr on Tomcat. Just some of the benefits to this are:
Reducing overhead for your CF server.
Indexing performance boost.
Separates search related troubleshooting from the rest of your application (like in your case).
You gain the freedom of making changes/upgrades to your Solr server independently.
Shannon's project on github: https://github.com/iotashan/cfsolrlib
MC