Hello Dima,
A stored field in your managed-schema like this will return Strings in the
order that they were stored in the array, including duplicate values.
<dynamicField name="*_stored_strings" type="strings" indexed="false"
stored="true" multiValued="true" sortMissingLast="true"/>
Docvalues on the other hand, are not guaranteed order, and automatically
remove duplicate values.
<dynamicField name="*_docvalues_strings" type="strings" indexed="true"
stored="true" multiValued="true" sortMissingLast="true" docValues="true"/>
See Retrieving DocValues During Search
<https://solr.apache.org/guide/solr/latest/indexing-guide/docvalues.html>:
While returning non-stored fields from DocValues, the values of a
multi-valued field are returned in sorted order rather than insertion order
and may have duplicates removed, see above. If you require the multi-valued
fields to be returned in the original insertion order, then make your
multi-valued field as stored (such a change requires reindexing).
To your health. Courage!
Christopher Tate
Principal Software Engineer - Red Hat Research
Red Hat Social Innovation Council Architect
Smarta Byar Smart Village FIWARE iHub Founder
[email protected]
M: +1-385-231-7783
On Tue, Jun 2, 2026 at 2:04 PM Dmitri Maziuk <[email protected]>
wrote:
> Hi all,
>
> I can't find anything in TFM on this: does Solr make any promises about
> the order of values in a multi-valued field?
>
> I.e. is it like python containers that keep insertion order until
> sorted, SQL resultsets that come in "any order" unless explicitly
> sorted, or C "undefined behaviour" that may kill your pets, burn your
> house down, and sing limericks over the ashes?
>
> We have plenty of documents that contain ordered lists of images. I
> don't see a good way to maintain that order in the Solr document:
>
> - we could make them child documents with "index number" field, but
> child documents tend to be a PITA to deal with,
>
> - we could make a delimited "compound" field (e.g. "1:${image}" but that
> also requires extra work to render client-side,
>
> - the easy way out is stick them into a multi-valued field but is there
> any guarantee that its values will be returned in the order of insertion?
>
> TIA
> Dima
>
>
