[LUCENE-9556] UnifiedHighlighter: distinguish no field from no passages in field

• Type: Improvement
• Status: Patch Available
• Priority: Major
• Resolution: Unresolved
• Component/s: modules/highlighter
• Lucene Fields: New
• Assignee: Unassigned
• Reporter: David Smiley
• Created: 02/Oct/20 20:28
• Updated: 28/Nov/24 10:30

Description

The UnifiedHighlighter does not distinguish between highlighting a field that is absent on a document, and highlighting a field that is present but no passages were found (can happen for a variety of reasons) – both cases produce null. While not a huge deal in general, it's an annoyance. It can be useful for the user/client to detect the content was present but not highlightable so that it might take some default action, like returning the whole field value (possibly to process in some way) or highlighting some other field.

Issue Links

• relates to: SOLR-10321 Unified highlighter returns empty fields when using glob