Major Description
SOLR-6183 introduced the new BBoxField type which allows the indexing of geospatial areas. However, upon trying it out I found numerous problems.
First off, as described already by me in the solr-user mailing list and by David Smiley in SOLR-6781, indexing doesn't work with dynamic fields.
However, the problems continue after that: when searching, for some reason it seems the score local parameter is necessary for filters on BBoxField fields to work. (Even for fq parameters, where a score makes of course no sense at all.) Otherwise, you get an unhelpful exception like this one:
java.lang.NullPointerException
at org.apache.solr.schema.BBoxField.getValueSourceFromSpatialArgs(BBoxField.java:114)
at org.apache.solr.schema.BBoxField.getValueSourceFromSpatialArgs(BBoxField.java:34)
at org.apache.solr.schema.AbstractSpatialFieldType.getQueryFromSpatialArgs(AbstractSpatialFieldType.java:269)
at org.apache.solr.schema.AbstractSpatialFieldType.createSpatialQuery(AbstractSpatialFieldType.java:223)
at org.apache.solr.search.SpatialFilterQParser.parse(SpatialFilterQParser.java:82)
at org.apache.solr.search.QParser.getQuery(QParser.java:141)
at org.apache.solr.handler.component.QueryComponent.prepare(QueryComponent.java:194)
at org.apache.solr.handler.component.SearchHandler.handleRequestBody(SearchHandler.java:197)
at org.apache.solr.handler.RequestHandlerBase.handleRequest(RequestHandlerBase.java:135)
at org.apache.solr.core.SolrCore.execute(SolrCore.java:1967)
at org.apache.solr.servlet.SolrDispatchFilter.execute(SolrDispatchFilter.java:777)
at org.apache.solr.servlet.SolrDispatchFilter.doFilter(SolrDispatchFilter.java:418)
at org.apache.solr.servlet.SolrDispatchFilter.doFilter(SolrDispatchFilter.java:207)
at org.eclipse.jetty.servlet.ServletHandler$CachedChain.doFilter(ServletHandler.java:1419)
at org.eclipse.jetty.servlet.ServletHandler.doHandle(ServletHandler.java:455)
at org.eclipse.jetty.server.handler.ScopedHandler.handle(ScopedHandler.java:137)
at org.eclipse.jetty.security.SecurityHandler.handle(SecurityHandler.java:557)
at org.eclipse.jetty.server.session.SessionHandler.doHandle(SessionHandler.java:231)
at org.eclipse.jetty.server.handler.ContextHandler.doHandle(ContextHandler.java:1075)
at org.eclipse.jetty.servlet.ServletHandler.doScope(ServletHandler.java:384)
at org.eclipse.jetty.server.session.SessionHandler.doScope(SessionHandler.java:193)
at org.eclipse.jetty.server.handler.ContextHandler.doScope(ContextHandler.java:1009)
at org.eclipse.jetty.server.handler.ScopedHandler.handle(ScopedHandler.java:135)
at org.eclipse.jetty.server.handler.ContextHandlerCollection.handle(ContextHandlerCollection.java:255)
at org.eclipse.jetty.server.handler.HandlerCollection.handle(HandlerCollection.java:154)
at org.eclipse.jetty.server.handler.HandlerWrapper.handle(HandlerWrapper.java:116)
at org.eclipse.jetty.server.Server.handle(Server.java:368)
at org.eclipse.jetty.server.AbstractHttpConnection.handleRequest(AbstractHttpConnection.java:489)
at org.eclipse.jetty.server.BlockingHttpConnection.handleRequest(BlockingHttpConnection.java:53)
at org.eclipse.jetty.server.AbstractHttpConnection.headerComplete(AbstractHttpConnection.java:942)
at org.eclipse.jetty.server.AbstractHttpConnection$RequestHandler.headerComplete(AbstractHttpConnection.java:1004)
at org.eclipse.jetty.http.HttpParser.parseNext(HttpParser.java:640)
at org.eclipse.jetty.http.HttpParser.parseAvailable(HttpParser.java:235)
at org.eclipse.jetty.server.BlockingHttpConnection.handle(BlockingHttpConnection.java:72)
at org.eclipse.jetty.server.bio.SocketConnector$ConnectorEndPoint.run(SocketConnector.java:264)
at org.eclipse.jetty.util.thread.QueuedThreadPool.runJob(QueuedThreadPool.java:608)
at org.eclipse.jetty.util.thread.QueuedThreadPool$3.run(QueuedThreadPool.java:543)
at java.lang.Thread.run(Thread.java:745)
This is true for both the !field and the !bbox query parser - even though the latter doesn't even allow the score parameter normally. Using the range syntax for filtering on BBoxField fields is not possible at all, as far as I can see, since there is no way to pass a score parameter.
If you use a wrong value for score, you get the following error message (sic!):
'score' local-param must be one of 'none', 'distance', or 'recipDistance'
Finally, only three of the four operators seem to work. When trying the DisjointTo (copied verbatim from the wiki page) operator, I got the following exception:
java.lang.IllegalArgumentException: Unknown Operation: DisjointTo