Hey Hoss, ________________________________________ From: Chris Hostetter [hossman_luc...@fucit.org] Sent: Monday, November 30, 2009 5:42 PM To: solr-dev@lucene.apache.org Subject: Re: SOLR-1131 - Multiple Fields per Field Type
It feels like something we've overlooked in this discussion is whether we need to worry about any FieldType API changes needed to make these new "PolyField" classes aware of when they are multivalued. The API suggestions grant made gives the FieldTYpe the ability to return a Filed[] from a single field value input -- but it doesn't provide any information about wether that field value is one of many values we're indexing for this field name. Imagine that i want to make an index of people i know. Each person also has multiple locations where they can frequently be found (home, work, gym, girlfriends house, favorite coffee shop, etc..). My common case is to search for people, not locations, so it doesn't make sense to flatten out and have a doc for each person+location, i just want a single doc per person, but htat means i need a "locations" field that's multivalued. If i'm using a simple "LatLonFieldType" that splits my comma seperated coordinate string into a "locations__LAT" and a "locations__LON" field then iassume it needs to do something special in the multiValued case to make sure later "near" searches don't get confused and think that the lat from my "work" and the lon from my "home" are actaully a third location. how do we solve this? I suppose we could just rely on mathing termPosition information, but that means the FieldType needs a way to specify the Analyzer for all of the field names it creates on the fly (another argument for reusing dynamicFields i guess) * or, alternatively, fieldTypes with configured pattern params * to specify matching increments -- but that seems somewhat brittle: what about complex PolyFieldTypes that want to create variable number of Field's based on the input? * This would seem to argue for smart FieldTypes that understand how their information is persisted (not just pattern parameters), but perhaps something that's difficult to codify in XML versus an actual P/L. Increments might be the only variant, but there may be more * ie: as i recall, if you want to index coordinates of polygon bounding boxes using cartisien grid fields, you need more field names for big polygons then you do for small polygons -- so what if someone wants a multivalued PolyField and indexes very big and very small polygons? ... termPositions doens't seem like it really cuts it here. * good food for thought -- I'll sleep on it tonight and see what I can think of to add to the discussion...* Cheers, Chris
