SOLR-18468: Rename --prompt-inputs to --session-inputs

[serhiy-bzhezytskyy]

https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/SOLR-18468

Description

--prompt-inputs is already documented in deployment-guide/solr-control-script-reference.adoc -- it was added in the same PR that introduced the feature (#4127, merged 2026-02-18), including a usage example and a note about quoting on Windows. Checked guide/solr/latest directly: it's Solr 10.0 and doesn't have it yet, so that's a publishing lag, not a documentation gap -- it'll show up once a release picks up main.

On the rename: the overload is real. bin/solr already has three differently-shaped --prompt* flags on one script:

• --prompt <true|false> under auth enable -- a boolean, whether to prompt for credentials
• --no-prompt under start -e -- skip the interactive session, use defaults
• --prompt-inputs <values> under start -e -- skip the interactive session, use these values instead

Solution

Renamed --prompt-inputs to --session-inputs. Considered three options:

• --example-inputs (your suggestion) -- rejected. -e/--example <name> already means "which built-in example to run" (cloud, techproducts, schemaless, films), so --example-inputs reads as input about the example, not answers to a prompt. Trades one overload for another.
• --answers <values> -- workable, no collisions, but doesn't tie to any existing term in the guide.
• --session-inputs <values> -- picked this one. The guide already calls this flow an "interactive session" in three places (this page and tutorial-solrcloud.adoc), and the code's own output says "This interactive session will help you launch a SolrCloud cluster." Reuses an existing term instead of adding a new one, and doesn't collide with -e, --prompt, or --no-prompt.

Didn't touch --no-prompt, even though it has the same --prompt* collision shape: it dates to 2014 (SOLR-3617), a decade in every release, versus --prompt-inputs's 7 months entirely unreleased. Renaming it would be a real breaking change for a widely-used flag, and that's a separate call from this ticket.

Clean rename, no deprecated alias -- --prompt-inputs has never shipped in a release, so there's no compatibility cost to weigh against the simplicity.

Full sweep, not just the flag name: RunExampleTool.java (option constant, the usingPromptInputs field, the CloudExampleParams record component, the mutual-exclusivity error message), bin/solr and bin/solr.cmd (help text and arg parsing), TestSolrCLIRunExample.java (test name, variables, assertion message), the ref guide, and the still-unreleased changelog entry for #4127 (its title said --prompt-inputs; corrected since it hasn't shipped under that name).

Tests

Ran the actual integration test, not just a recompile: ./gradlew :solr:core:test --tests TestSolrCLIRunExample -- 6/6 pass, including the renamed testSolrCloudExampleWithSessionInputs, which starts a real SolrCloud example via --session-inputs and checks the collection it creates. Also -Pvalidation.errorprone=true compile (clean; errorprone is skipped by default locally but -Werror in CI) and buildLocalAntoraSite + checkSiteLinks for the ref guide (clean, no broken links). Repo-wide grep for every old identifier -- zero hits outside gitignored build output.

AI-assisted (Claude Sonnet 5).

[serhiy-bzhezytskyy]

@epugh tagging you since this is under SOLR-18459/SOLR-18468, which you filed.

[epugh]

I've been struggling a lot on this one.... --session-inputs seems to generic... What about "--script-inputs"? I could potentially imagine that at some point in the future you could use something like that for multiple bin/solr tools, like the bin/solr package....