Hi, We added a custom field type to allow an indexed binary field type that supports search (exact match), prefix search, and sort as unsigned bytes lexicographical compare. For sort, BytesRef's UTF8SortedAsUnicodeComparator accomplishes what we want, and even though the name of the comparator mentions UTF8, it doesn't actually assume so and just does byte-level operation, so it's good. However, when we do this across different nodes, we run into an issue where in QueryComponent.doFieldSortValues:
// Must do the same conversion when sorting by a // String field in Lucene, which returns the terms // data as BytesRef: if (val instanceof BytesRef) { UnicodeUtil.UTF8toUTF16((BytesRef)val, spare); field.setStringValue(spare.toString()); val = ft.toObject(field); } UnicodeUtil.UTF8toUTF16 is called on our byte array,which isn't actually UTF8. I did a hack where I specified our own field comparator to be ByteBuffer based to get around that instanceof check, but then the field value gets transformed into BYTEARR in JavaBinCodec, and when it's unmarshalled, it gets turned into byte[]. Then, in QueryComponent.mergeIds, a ShardFieldSortedHitQueue is constructed with ShardDoc.getCachedComparator, which decides to give me comparatorNatural in the else of the TODO for CUSTOM, which barfs because byte[] are not Comparable... Any advice is appreciated! Thanks, Jessica