More of the same.... So, now all I want to do is a SpanNearQuery on a wildcard. No problem if I can use a wildcard query, but I can't because of the "TooManyClauses" issue.
We have two types of wildcards, truncation (which I can handle by indexing successively shorter terms and a special character at the end. i.e. cat$ ca$ c$). This is neat, it gives me relevance, speed, all the virtues. The second is a??b????c. Which I don't see any clever indexing schemes to handle, but let me think about that more at lunch <G>. Without asking you to write *too* much for me, what should I look at in order to make this work with SpanNear? I'm guessing that I have to iterate the wildcard terms, collect a filter for documents "close enough" and use that filtered query (again thanks for all your help figuring this out) to restrict the returned documents. What I have in mind is enumerating over the first wildcard term. For each successive term, ask if other terms are "close enough" and using that answer to possibly turn off that document in the filter. Eventually I'll have a filter that is what I want. Now, this all seems expensive and complex. If the answer is "don't go there, use clever indexing or don't try it with very many documents because it'll take forever", then that in intself would save me a bunch of work. Thanks again Erick
