We are in the process of developing large scale support for external file fields. This is designed to accommodate very large product catalogs with a very large number of custom price lists. It can also be applied to inventory or other frequently changing values. The question I have is if this is a suitable open source contribution due to certain implementation details.
The approach taken requires the offline processing of the files from the documented external file format into a specific binary format. A command line tool is being developed to process the external files. Since this offline processing is a required data preparation step it may be outside of the scope of Solr. But it also might fit as a module. I'm curious how the community feels about this as a module. Joel Bernstein http://joelsolr.blogspot.com/
