Hello SOLR experts, I am new to SOLR and I am trying to do alphanumeric sort on string field(s). However, in my case, alphabets should come before numbers. I also have a large number of such fields (~2500), any of which can be alphanumerically sorted upon at runtime. I’ve explored below concepts in SOLR to arrive at a solution:
1) Custom similarity plugin : far fetched, and probably not even applicable to my usecase 2) Analyzer/tokenizer and regex magic to left pad number parts with 0s : two disadvantages – I believe this needs extra fields (copy) to be created which I cannot do (2500 more fields is too much) and this will still push numbers before alphabets 3) Custom function (ValueSource) and regex magic to left pad numeric tokens with 0s, and invoke function for sorting only – a bit better than the previous one, but still numbers come before alphabets. 4) Custom function (ValueSource) and regex magic to left pad numeric tokens with 0s, prefix numeric tokens with tilde (~), and invoke function for sorting only – this is where I stand right now. Very ugly, but it works. Because tilde has a very high ASCII value, it pushes numbers behind alphabets. There should obviously be a better approach I am missing. Please help!