Here is a work around. Stick the high value and low value into other fields. Use those fields for sorting.
Bill Bell Sent from mobile On Mar 17, 2011, at 8:49 AM, Yonik Seeley <yo...@lucidimagination.com> wrote: > On Wed, Mar 16, 2011 at 6:08 PM, Jonathan Rochkind <rochk...@jhu.edu> wrote: >> Also... if lucene is already capable of sorting on multi-valued field by >> choosing the largest value.... largest vs. smallest is presumably just >> arbitrary there, there is presumably no performance implication to choosing >> the smallest instead of the largest. It just chooses the largest, according >> to Yonik. > > It's a little more complicated than that. > It's not so much an explicit feature in lucene, but just what > naturally happens when building the field cache via uninverting an > indexed field. > > It's pretty much this: > > for every term in the field: > for every document that matches that term: > value[document] = term > > And since terms are iterated from smallest to largest (and no, you > can't reverse this) > larger values end up overwriting smaller values. > There's no simple patch to pick the smallest rather than the largest. > > In the past, lucene used to try and detect this multi-valued case by > checking the number of values set in the whole array. This was > unreliable though and the check was discarded. > > -Yonik > http://lucidimagination.com