[LUCENE-2142] FieldCache.getStringIndex should not throw exception if term count exceeds doc count

• Type: Bug
• Status: Closed
• Priority: Minor
• Resolution: Fixed
• Fix Version/s: 2.9.4, 3.0.3, 3.1, 4.0-ALPHA
• Component/s: core/search
• Lucene Fields: New
• Assignee: Michael McCandless
• Reporter: Michael McCandless
• Created: 10/Dec/09 17:32
• Updated: 28/Aug/22 12:16
• Resolved: 24/Jun/10 12:10

Description

Spinoff of LUCENE-2133/LUCENE-831.

Currently FieldCache cannot handle more than one value per field.
We may someday want to fix that... but until that day:

FieldCache.getStringIndex currently does a simplistic check to try to
catch when you've accidentally allowed more than one term per field,
by testing if the number of unique terms exceeds the number of
documents.

The problem is, this is not a perfect check, in that it allows false
negatives (you could have more than one term per field for some docs
and the check won't catch you).

Further, the exception thrown is the unchecked RuntimeException.

So this means... you could happily think all is good, until some day,
well into production, once you've updated enough docs, suddenly the
check will catch you and throw an unhandled exception, stopping all
searches [that need to sort by this string field] in their tracks.
It's not gracefully degrading.

I think we should simply remove the test, ie, if you have more terms
than docs then the terms simply overwrite one another.

Issue Links

• breaks: SOLR-2339 No error reported when sorting on a multiValued field
• is related to: SOLR-2249 ArrayIndexOutOfBoundsException thrown instead of useful FieldCache exception when too many terms