[SOLR-6034] Use a wildcard in order to delete fields with Atomic Update

• Type: Improvement
• Status: Open
• Priority: Major
• Resolution: Unresolved
• Affects Version/s: 4.7
• Assignee: Unassigned
• Reporter: Constantin Muraru
• Created: 29/Apr/14 20:34
• Updated: 30/Apr/14 08:47

Description

As discussed on the SOLR user group, it would a great feature to be able to remove all fields matching a pattern, using Atomic Updates.

Example:
<add><doc>
<field name="id">100</field>
<field name="*_day_i" update="set" null="true"></field>
</doc></add>

The *_day_i should be expanded server-side and all fields matching this pattern should be removed from the specified document.

Workaround: When removing fields from a document, we can make a query to SOLR from the client, in order to see what fields are actually present for the specific document. After that, we can create the XML update document to be sent to SOLR. However, this is going to increase the number of queries to SOLR and for large amount of documents this is going to weigh pretty much. It would be great performance-wise and simplicity-wise to be able to provide wildcards.