Winfried -
It's absolutely fine to add a non-required field to the schema (and restart).
No reindexing necessary.
It can be handy to find documents without a field by using q=-fieldname:[* TO *]
Erik
On Jul 23, 2012, at 05:44 , Winfried Umbrath wrote:
> Hi,
>
> I want to add an optional field (required="false") to the schema of a
> running solr instance. There are already some million documents indexed
> which do not contain this newly added field. Only documents added _after_
> the schema change are expected to contain this field, i.e. be searchable by
> this field.
>
> My question is, do I have to do anything else than restarting the server
> after I changed the schema? Do I need to re-index? I do not know how the
> index is built, but my feelings tell me I do not have to re-index.
>
> Thanks in advance,
> Winfried
