I needed to return my hits list in date/time order (instead of relevancy). So, I implemented a class that converted dates to an int and stored the integer as a field in my index. I passed a Sort object to the IndexSearcher (indicating that the sort field was convertible to int) to get things back in date/time order. It works great.
Now I need to do a search within a date/time range (e.g., all the documents between 1/1/2005 00:00:00 to 1/5/2005 23:59:59). It appears that there is no way to use the integer date to do the range search since Lucene is really looking at the string representation of the int. Even prefixing enough zeros to make all of the integers the same length doesn't help (darn negative numbers). Have I missed something? Or, will I need to put some kind of date/time string that looks like "20050308172533" (for 3/8/2005 17:25:33) in the index? My second question is whether range searches are efficient? I seem to recall reading somewhere that range searches get converted to a list of the individual items. Since a day has 86,400 seconds, a few days worth of searching would require a very large list. Please tell me that I'm out-in-the-weeds on my recall and that range searches are efficient (i.e., it's effectively just doing a string compare with the start and end terms). Scott
