Lucene.net query for contains and avoiding empty string fields

Question

I have a Lucene index setup which I can query fine. I just am not able to get a "field not equals to empty string" condition to work. For example in the below code specimen, I want to have 3 conditions

1. Where "country tag" field contains "{4ED2F7EE-5C2A-418C-B2F6-236F94166BA1}".
2. Where "country tag" field is not empty string.

3. Where "date" range is between "20110101T000000" and "20121001T000000".

       WildcardQuery taggingQuery = new WildcardQuery(new Term("country tag", "*" + ShortID.Encode("{4ED2F7EE-5C2A-418C-B2F6-236F94166BA1}").ToLowerInvariant() + "*"));
       TermQuery taggingNotQuery = new Term("country tag", " "));
   
       RangeQuery rangeQuery = new RangeQuery(new Term("date", "20110101T000000"), new Term("date", "20121001T000000"), true);
   
       BooleanQuery booleanQuery = new BooleanQuery();
       booleanQuery.Add(taggingQuery, BooleanClause.Occur.MUST);
       booleanQuery.Add(taggingNotQuery, BooleanClause.Occur.MUST_NOT);
       booleanQuery.Add(rangeQuery, BooleanClause.Occur.MUST);
   

I have a feeling I am doing this wrong or my query is wrong somehow. I should not need a condition where I should have to look out for empty or null fields.

Any help is appreciated!

Answer 1

I should've paid more attention when setting up the index. I forgot to add field analyzers for each field. The multilist fields were getting indexed with a different analyzer instead of the standard analyzer. I added this to my config section for field crawls and my query started working

<fieldTypes hint="raw:AddFieldTypes">
                  <!-- Text fields need to be tokenized -->
                  <fieldType name="single-line text" storageType="NO" indexType="TOKENIZED" vectorType="NO" boost="1f" />
                  <fieldType name="multi-line text" storageType="NO" indexType="TOKENIZED" vectorType="NO" boost="1f" />
                  <fieldType name="word document" storageType="NO" indexType="TOKENIZED" vectorType="NO" boost="1f" />
                  <fieldType name="html" storageType="NO" indexType="TOKENIZED" vectorType="NO" boost="1f" />
                  <fieldType name="rich text" storageType="NO" indexType="TOKENIZED" vectorType="NO" boost="1f" />
                  <fieldType name="memo" storageType="NO" indexType="TOKENIZED" vectorType="NO" boost="1f" />
                  <fieldType name="text" storageType="NO" indexType="TOKENIZED" vectorType="NO" boost="1f" />
                  <!-- Multilist based fields need to be tokenized to support search of multiple values -->
                  <fieldType name="multilist" storageType="NO" indexType="TOKENIZED" vectorType="NO" boost="1f" />
                  <fieldType name="treelist" storageType="NO" indexType="TOKENIZED" vectorType="NO" boost="1f" />
                  <fieldType name="treelistex" storageType="NO" indexType="TOKENIZED" vectorType="NO" boost="1f" />
                  <fieldType name="checklist" storageType="NO" indexType="TOKENIZED" vectorType="NO" boost="1f" />
                  <!-- Legacy tree list field from ver. 5.3 -->
                  <fieldType name="tree list" storageType="NO" indexType="TOKENIZED" vectorType="NO" boost="1f" />
                </fieldTypes>

Answer 2

If you allow '*' as the first character in the search string, Lucene can use queries like "countrytag:*" to find all documents that contain anything in the countrytag field. (Lucene's default is to disable an initial '*' in a query string.)