'Exists' query not working for geospatial fields in Solr >= 8.5.0?

[Ondra Horak <on...@gmail.com>]

Hi,

I just found Solr queries like field:* are not working anymore for
fields of type SpatialRecursivePrefixTreeFieldType.  It seems to work
in 8.4.1, since 8.5.0 it just gives an empty result. Is this an
intended behaviour, or a bug?

Looking at Solr release notes I'd say it might be a consequence of a
bugfix introduced in Solr 8.5.0:
SOLR-11746: Adding existence queries for PointFields.
DocValuesFieldExistsQuery and NormsFieldExistsQuery are used for
existence queries when possible.
(Houston Putman, hossman, Kai Chan)

What would be the best way to replace this type of queries? I tried to
use a query like field:** as a workaround which works but is quite
inefficient. Another workaround is to search with a large distance to
match any possible point. This is pretty fast (in fact, with my data
it is even faster than field:* in 8.4.1) but it seems like an ugly
hack. Anyway, I would welcome a more transparent behaviour.


Regards,

Ondra Horak