[LUCENE-5989] Allow StringField to take BytesRef value, to index a single binary token

• Type: Improvement
• Status: Closed
• Priority: Major
• Resolution: Fixed
• Fix Version/s: 5.2, 6.0
• Lucene Fields: New
• Assignee: Michael McCandless
• Reporter: Michael McCandless
• Created: 05/Oct/14 09:02
• Updated: 28/Aug/22 14:17
• Resolved: 11/Apr/15 07:48

Description

5 years ago (LUCENE-1458) we "enabled" fully binary terms in the
lowest levels of Lucene (the codec APIs) yet today, actually adding an
arbitrary byte[] binary term during indexing is far from simple: you
must make a custom Field with a custom TokenStream and a custom
TermToBytesRefAttribute, as far as I know.

This is supremely expert, I wonder if anyone out there has succeeded
in doing so?

I think we should make indexing a single byte[] as simple as indexing
a single String.

This is a pre-cursor for issues like LUCENE-5596 (encoding IPv6
address as byte[16]) and LUCENE-5879 (encoding native numeric values
in their simple binary form).