[SOLR-3250] Dynamic Field capabilities based on value not name

• Type: Improvement
• Status: Closed
• Priority: Major
• Resolution: Fixed
• Fix Version/s: 4.4, 6.0
• Assignee: Steven Rowe
• Reporter: Grant Ingersoll
• Created: 15/Mar/12 14:47
• Updated: 09/May/16 18:45
• Resolved: 01/Jul/13 16:53

Description

In some situations, one already knows the schema of their content, so having to declare a schema in Solr becomes cumbersome in some situations. For instance, if you have all your content in JSON (or can easily generate it) or other typed serializations, then you already have a schema defined. It would be nice if we could have support for dynamic fields that used whatever name was passed in, but then picked the appropriate FieldType for that field based on the value of the content. So, for instance, if the input is a number, it would select the appropriate numeric type. If it is a plain text string, it would pick the appropriate text field (you could even add in language detection here). If it is comma separated, it would treat them as keywords, etc. Also, we could likely send in a hint as to the type too.

With this approach, you of course have a "first in wins" situation, but assuming you have this schema defined elsewhere, it is likely fine.

Supporting such cases would allow us to be schemaless when appropriate, while offering the benefits of schemas when appropriate. Naturally, one could mix and match these too.

Issue Links

• requires: SOLR-4891 JsonLoader should preserve field value types from the JSON content stream
• requires: SOLR-3251 dynamically add fields to schema
• requires: SOLR-4892 Add field update processors to parse/convert String-typed fields to Date, Number, and Boolean
• requires: SOLR-4894 Add a new update processor factory that will dynamically add fields to the schema if an input document contains unknown fields
• requires: SOLR-4893 Add a FieldMutatingUpdateProcessor FieldNameSelector that checks whether a field matches any schema field
• requires: SOLR-4897 Create new example config set for schemaless mode