Google Search Appliance Meta Value Arrays?

Question

I'm trying to write a Google Search Appliance emulator/wrapper that uses Lucene internally (so likely more questions to come), and I'm trying to understand how exactly the GSA handles meta values that seem to be arrays. The GSA response includes:

<MT N="FIELD_NAME" V="VAL1 | VAL2 | VAL3"/>

A query with the following parameter will hit this result:

requiredfields=field_name:val1.field_name:val2

However, the GSA documentation mentions nothing about handling of arrays or multiple values for meta fields. Can anyone confirm that this is standard GSA behavior, despite being apparently undocumented? Or is it possible there is custom handling going on?

Unfortunately, I do not know what GSA version we're using or how to check. I expect it was purchased between 2 and 5 years ago.

Answer 1

The new GSA version (7.0) allows for splitting up the values in metadata fields based on a seperator. In your case "|" seems to be the case.

That will instruct the GSA to index those values as separate field/values like FIELD_NAME=VAL1, FIELD_NAME=VAL2 etc.

From there on you can use these values in facets and/or fieldsearches with the requiresfields parameter.