The *:* (star colon star) means "all records". The trick is to use (*:* AND -field:[* TO *]). It's silly, but there it is.
A performance note: we switched from empty fields to fields with a standard 'empty' value. This way we don't have to do a range check to find records with empty fields. Lance Norskog -----Original Message----- From: Karen Loughran [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Monday, January 14, 2008 7:51 AM To: solr-user@lucene.apache.org Cc: Erick Erickson Subject: Re: field:(-null) returns records where field was not specified Hi Erik, thanks for your reply, I had read this page. But I'm not using the "NOT" operator, I'm using the "-" operator. I'm assuming there is a subtle difference between them in that NOT qualifies something else, hence needs 2 terms. Isn't the "-" operator supposed to be a complement to the "+" operator, ie. excludes something rather than requiring it ? thanks Karen On Monday 14 January 2008 15:14:05 Erick Erickson wrote: > Have you seen this page? > http://lucene.apache.org/java/docs/queryparsersyntax.html > > From that page: > Note: The NOT operator cannot be used with just one term. For example, > the following search will return no results: > NOT "jakarta apache" > > > Erick > > On Jan 14, 2008 9:30 AM, Karen Loughran <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > > Hi all, > > > > We are indexing different types of documents, some with certain > > fields set and some without, some fields sometimes in both. > > > > If a particular field is missing in a newly added record, I would > > have expected the query: > > > > field_name:(-null) > > > > not to return this particular record in the response, ie, I'm > > assuming the field is set to null. > > > > But the response we see includes empty docs: > > > > ...... > > .... > > .. > > <doc> > > </doc> > > <doc> > > </doc> > > <doc> > > </doc> > > etc, etc.... > > .. > > .... > > > > Can someone explain why field_name:(-null) returns the records where > > field_name is missing ? > > > > We note that if we do the range operation we can get a response > > without the records with no field_name: > > > > field_name:[* TO *] > > > > Many thanks > > Karen No virus found in this incoming message. Checked by AVG Free Edition. Version: 7.5.516 / Virus Database: 269.19.0/1218 - Release Date: 1/10/2008 1:32 PM
