What you are describing corrisponds pretty closely to some work currently in progress to make the DataImportHandler integrate with the ExtractingRequestHandler/Tika ...
https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/SOLR-1358 ...in the meantime, your options are either to extract all the metadata yourself and push them (along with the attachment) as literal field values to ExtractingRequestHandler, or extract the content of hte attachment yourself and use one the XmlUpdateRequestHandler. : I have a requirement where I am indexing attachements. Attachements hang off : of a database entity(table). I also need to include some meta-data info from : the database table as part of the index. Trying to find best way to : implement using custom handler or something? where custom handler gets all : required db records (those include document path) by consuming a web service : (I can expose a method from my application as a web service) and then : itereate through a list (returned by web serivce) and index required meta : data along with indexing attachments (attachements path is part of meta data : of an entity). Has anyone tried something like this or have suggestions how : best to implement this requirement? -Hoss