Field management

Once your primary work of field types setup is done, field definition is a small task. Just as with field types, the fields element of schema.xml holds the field definition.

Field properties

Let's first see a sample field definition:

<field name="weight" type="float" default=”0.0” indexed="true" stored="true"/>

In the preceding example, we have defined a field named weight, whose field type is float with a default value of 0.0. Moreover, the indexed as well as stored properties are explicitly set to true.

Field definitions will have these properties:

• name: The field name. This has to be alphanumeric and can include underscore characters. It cannot begin with a digit. Reserved names should start and end with underscores (for example, _root_). Every field must have a name.
• type: The name of the fieldType. All the fields should have a type.
• default: The default value to be used for the field.

Fields and field types share many of the optional properties here. If there are two different...