(I have this nasty habit of commiting cool things to Solr that should be announced on solr-user, and then deciding I'll wait untill they are in a nightly snapshot before I send an email about them -- and then forgetting that I never sent the mail).
A while back I added some functionality to the DateField class which extends it's parsing abilities so that it can recognize strings like "NOW", "NOW+1DAY", "NOW+1DAY-3HOURS", and even "NOW/MONTH+3MONTHS" which means round down to the nearest month, then add three months. You can play with this syntax and see what exactly it does with various inputs by looking at the "parsedquery" debug info for any date field, if you are running the example config from Solr something like this will work... http://localhost:8983/solr/select?version=2.1&q=field_dt%3A%5BNOW+TO+NOW%2FDAY%2B1MONTH%5D&start=0&rows=0&debugQuery=on This syntax was added to not only make it easier to run quick data inspection queries like "startDate:[NOW TO *]" but also so that *relative* date based queries can be included directly in the default query options for request handlers configured in solrconfig.xml. For example, if you only want to let people search articles less then a month old, you could put... <str name="fq">pubDate:[NOW/DAY-1MONTH]</str> ...in your requestHandler config, and that cached filter query will be reusable for 24 hours. This syntax is supported anywhere Solr parses a DateField, so it can even be used in <field> values when sending <add><doc> messages. More info can be found in the javadocs... http://incubator.apache.org/solr/docs/api/org/apache/solr/schema/DateField.html http://incubator.apache.org/solr/docs/api/org/apache/solr/util/DateMathParser.html -Hoss
