Thanks Yonik,
That's exactly what I needed to know. I'll adapt my xsl process to
omit null values.
Tricia
On Thu, 27 Jul 2006, Yonik Seeley wrote:
On 7/27/06, Tricia Williams <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
Hi,
I have created a process which uses xsl to convert my data to the form
indicated in the examples so that it can be added to the index as the solr
tutorial indicates:
<add>
<doc>
<field name="field">value</field>
...
</doc>
</add>
In some cases the xsl process will create a field element with no data.
(ie <field name="field"/>) Is this considered bad input and will not be
accepted?
If the desired semantics are "the field doesn't exist" or "null value"
then yes. There isn't a way to represent a field without a value in
Lucene except to not add the field for that document. If it's totally
ignored, it probably shouldn't be in the XML.
Now, one might think we could drop fields with no value, but that's
problematic because it goes against the XML standard:
http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-xml/#sec-starttags
[Definition: An element with no content is said to be empty.] The
representation of an empty element is either a start-tag immediately
followed by an end-tag, or an empty-element tag. [Definition: An
empty-element tag takes a special form:]
So <a></a> and <a/> are supposed to be equivalent. Given that, it
does look like Solr should treat <field name="val"/> like a
zero-length string (but that's not what you wanted, right?)
-Yonik
