[LUCENE-2308] Separately specify a field's type

• Type: Improvement
• Status: Closed
• Priority: Major
• Resolution: Fixed
• Fix Version/s: 4.0
• Component/s: core/index
• Labels: gsoc2011 lucene-gsoc-11 mentor
• Lucene Fields: New
• Assignee: Michael McCandless
• Reporter: Michael McCandless
• Created: 10/Mar/10 20:30
• Updated: 28/Aug/22 12:21
• Resolved: 18/Mar/13 22:03

Description

This came up from dicussions on IRC. I'm summarizing here...

Today when you make a Field to add to a document you can set things
index or not, stored or not, analyzed or not, details like omitTfAP,
omitNorms, index term vectors (separately controlling
offsets/positions), etc.

I think we should factor these out into a new class (FieldType?).
Then you could re-use this FieldType instance across multiple fields.

The Field instance would still hold the actual value.

We could then do per-field analyzers by adding a setAnalyzer on the
FieldType, instead of the separate PerFieldAnalzyerWrapper (likewise
for per-field codecs (with flex), where we now have
PerFieldCodecWrapper).

This would NOT be a schema! It's just refactoring what we already
specify today. EG it's not serialized into the index.

This has been discussed before, and I know Michael Busch opened a more
ambitious (I think?) issue. I think this is a good first baby step. We could
consider a hierarchy of FIeldType (NumericFieldType, etc.) but maybe hold
off on that for starters...

Issue Links

• blocks: LUCENE-2317 allow separate control of whether docTermFreq and positions are indexed
• depends upon: LUCENE-3177 Decouple indexer from Document/Field impls

Sub-Tasks

• Reduce Fieldable, AbstractField and Field complexity: Closed