: I'll catch that and deal with it then (Or is it bad programming ?) . that's a psuedo-religious question -- i will only say that many people recomend against using Exception catching to drive control flow, it's called an "Exception" because it's suppose to be the "Exception" to the norm ... if an large percentage of hte time these field names aren't going to exist in your schema, you should probably be checking for the non-existing field first.
Note that another way to approach this is to add a dynamicField that matches "*" (there's an example commented out in the example schema) and give it a fieldtype using a query Analyzer that does whatever you want your special analyzer to do in the event of non-existent field (probably just produce no tokens) ... the only downside to this approach is that you won't get any errors if you inadvertantly index a document with an unexpected field (unless you give this new fieldtype a custom *indexing* analyzer that allways throws an exception) -Hoss
