: Sorry Hoss if I came down too hard against the view that "*" should mean : "all docs". With the renewed clarity that getting a little sleep : brings, I better appreciate the merits of your position. And that it's : dangerous trying to decide what makes sense for other people.
no worries ... i didn't take it as being harsh. I don't actually have any opinion about what a plain q=* should do ... I just worry that if we add zero width prefixes, and that results in q=* meaning q=defaultSearchField:* that might confuse a lot of people who expect it to be something else. if 50% of the people thing q=* means one thing, and 50% think q=* means something else, then the safest thing to do is probably to make sure that q=* is an error. : Obviously from a practical perspective, a MatchAllDocsQuery is quite a : bit faster than matching all docs having some value for a particular : field, and should be encouraged unless the latter is explicitly desired. FYI: there is special syntax in the trunk Lucene QueryParser for generating a MatchAllDocs, it's: *:* ... we just don't use that version of Lucene in Solr yet. : Now I think there is fair agreement that it would be great if field:* : could be made to work. So if some portion of users want unqualified * i actually have no opinion on that either ... i think field:[* TO *] is just as easy to use, and less prone to confusion about what it means (ie: you have to understand some of the syntax to know to try and use it, you aren't likely to inadvertantely use it and think you're getting a different result set then you really are) : processed as the equivalent of <default-field>:*, then perhaps there : should be a configuration directive which controls whether unqualified * : (or perhaps any defined string) is trapped? I haven't come across : existing SOLR code to handle "*" as a special case of PrefixQuery, so I : assume the trapping should be at the level of SolrQueryParser, similar : to how [* TO *] is trapped for range queries? there is a QueryParser.setAllowLeadingWildcard method which we could set based on a schema value (much like we do for the defaultOperator) ... i think it would be perfectly fine making that an option which defaults to false and the result of enabling it being that q=* uses the defaultSearchField ... at least then people need to consider the issue and turn it on first. -Hoss
