I think I would tackle this in a slightly different manner. When you are creating this index, make sure that that field has a default value. Make sure this value is something that could never appear in the index otherwise. Then, when you goto place this field into the index, either write out your actual value, or the default one.
Then when you get the document back, you can look at that field, and solve your question. You can also craft queries that specifically avoid entries that don't have a value in this field with a not clause. Hope this helps, Matt Erick Erickson wrote: > searching for fieldname:* will be *extremely* expensive as it will, by > default, > build a giant OR clause consisting of every term in the field. You'll throw > MaxClauses exceptions right and left. I'd follow Tim's thread lead first.... > > Best > Erick > > 2009/4/8 王巍巍 <ww.wang...@gmail.com> > > >> first you should change your querypaser to accept wildcard query by calling >> method of QueryParser >> setAllowLeadingWildcard >> then you can query like this: fieldname:* >> >> 2009/4/9 Tim Williams <william...@gmail.com> >> >> >>> On Wed, Apr 8, 2009 at 11:45 AM, addman <addiek...@yahoo.com> wrote: >>> >>>> Hi, >>>> Is it possible to create a query to search a field for any value? I >>>> >>> just >>> >>>> need to know if the optional field contain any data at all. >>>> >>> google for: lucene field existence >>> >>> There's no way built in, one strategy[1] is to have a 'meta field' >>> that contains the names of the fields the document contains. >>> >>> --tim >>> >>> [1] - >>> http://www.mail-archive.com/lucene-u...@jakarta.apache.org/msg07703.html >>> >>> --------------------------------------------------------------------- >>> To unsubscribe, e-mail: java-user-unsubscr...@lucene.apache.org >>> For additional commands, e-mail: java-user-h...@lucene.apache.org >>> >>> >>> >> -- >> 王巍巍(Weiwei Wang) >> Department of Computer Science >> Gulou Campus of Nanjing University >> Nanjing, P.R.China, 210093 >> >> Mobile: 86-13913310569 >> MSN: ww.wang...@gmail.com >> Homepage: http://cs.nju.edu.cn/rl/weiweiwang >> >> > > -- Matthew Hall Software Engineer Mouse Genome Informatics mh...@informatics.jax.org (207) 288-6012 --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: java-user-unsubscr...@lucene.apache.org For additional commands, e-mail: java-user-h...@lucene.apache.org