: The right approach for more flexible date parsing is probably to add : more functionality to the date field and configure via optional : attributes.
Adding configuration options to DateField seems like it might ultimately be the right choice for changing the *internal* format, but assuming we want to keep the internal representation of DateField fixed and unconfigurable for the time being and address the the various *external* formatting issues i imagine the simplest things to tackle this (in a way that is consistent with the other datatypes) would be... 1) change DateField to support Analyzers. that way you could have seperate analyzers for indexing vs querying just like a text field (so you could for example send Solr seconds since epoch when indexing, and query query using MM/DD/YYYY) The Analyzers used would be responsible for producing Tokens which match what values the current DateField.toInternal() already consideres legal (either a DateMath string or an iso8601 string). (In general a "DateTranslatingTokenFilter" class would be a pretty cool addition to Lucene, it could as constructor args two DateFormatters (one for parsing the incoming tokens, and one for formating the outgoing tokens) and a boolean indicating wether it's job was to replace matching tokens or inject duplicate tokens in the same position ... maybe another option indicating wether incoming Tokens that can't be parsed should be striped or passed through ... the idea being that for something like DateFiled you would use KeywordTokenizer along with an instance of this to parse whatever format you wanted -- but when parsing generic text you might have several of these TokenFilters configured with differnet DateFormatters so if they see a Token in the text that matches a known DateFormat they could inject the name of the month, or the day of hte week into the text at the same position.) 2) add options to the various QueryResponseWriters to control which format they use when writting fields out. .. in the case of XmlResposneWriter it would still produce a <date> tag, but the value would be formated according to the configuration. -Hoss
