There seem to be a couple of approaches that people have adopted in implementing a query suggestion / auto completion feature using Solr. Depending on the situation, one might use the terms component or go the way of using EdgeNGramFilters and then creating querying the index on the ngrammed field. I also found that there is a bug currently active in JIRA ( http://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/SOLR-1316) for creating an auto suggest component.
I am curious how an approach that simply uses the wildcard query functionality on an indexed field would work. While Solr does not support wildcard queries out of the box currently, it will definitely be included in the future and I believe the edismax parser already lets you do that. Would using the wildcard query to implement autocomplete have high overhead and be less efficient than the other approaches? Am I missing anything here? Kindly comment and provide some guidance. Thanks, Prasanna.
