I want to be able to search on a field which contains a numerical value, specifying a range, such as 1-100. If my understanding of Lucene is correct, all fields look essentially like strings, so a simple ranhe query won't work (after all, searching on the range "a"-"azz" should not match "b"). So my plan is to pad up all numbers to a fixed length by prefixing them with zeros on both indexing and search, so the range then becomes (e.g.) 000001-000100.
My one worry is that it will upset the rankings, as number which happened to have occurred in more documents will get a lower IDF, whereas all number really ought to receive equal treatment. So a possible refinement is to include the clause for the number in my overall boolean expression, but give it a boost of zero or some small number. So it has to match but does not contribute to the relevance Any comments? Does this seem like a reasonable way to do things? I assume the internal handling of dates does something like it. -- David Elworthy -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: <mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]> For additional commands, e-mail: <mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
