UnifiedHighlighter: distinguish no field from no passages in field [LUCENE-9556]
- Dominant language
- Java
- Stars
- 3.6k
- Forks
- 1.4k
- Avg merge
- 2d 11h
- Merged PRs (30d)
- 88
Description
The UnifiedHighlighter does not distinguish between highlighting a field that is absent on a document, and highlighting a field that is present but no passages were found (can happen for a variety of reasons) – both cases produce null. While not a huge deal in general, it's an annoyance. It can be useful for the user/client to detect the content was present but not highlightable so that it might take some default action, like returning the whole field value (possibly to process in some way) or highlighting some other field.
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Migrated from [LUCENE-9556](https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/LUCENE-9556) by David Smiley (@dsmiley)
Linked issues:
- [SOLR-10321](https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/SOLR-10321)
Contributor guide
Research direction
Start with the UnifiedHighlighter entry point and trace how it handles a missing field versus a present field with no passages. The work is done when those two cases are distinguishable to the user, including the no-passages case described in the issue.
Written by the indexing model from the issue text.
Assessment
- Tech stack
- java
- Domain
- search
- Issue type
- Bug
- Difficulty
- 4/5
- Estimated time
- 3-5 days
- Activity status
- Stale
- Clarity
- Mostly clear
- Newbie friendliness
- 45/100