Custom fieldtype with sharding?

[Peter Cline <pc...@pobox.upenn.edu>]

Hi all,
I'm having an issue with using a custom fieldtype with distributed 
search.  It may be the case that what I'm looking for could be 
accomplished in a different way, but this is my first stab at it.

I'm looking to store XML in a field.  What I've done, which works fine, 
is to:
- on ingest, wrap the XML in a CDATA tag
- write a simple class that extends org.apache.solr.schema.TextField, 
which writes an XML node much in the way that a textfield would, but 
without escaping the contents

It looks like this:
public class XMLField extends TextField {
    @Override
    public void write(TextResponseWriter xmlWriter, String name, 
Fieldable f)
          throws java.io.IOException {
       Writer writer = xmlWriter.getWriter();
       writer.write("<xml name=" + '"' + name + '"' + '>');
       writer.write(f.stringValue(), 0, f.stringValue() == null ? 0 : 
f.stringValue().length());
       writer.write("</xml>");
  }
}

Like I said, simple.  Not especially pretty, but it does the job.  Works 
fine for normal searching, I get back a response like:
<xml name="xmlField"><xml-contents-unescaped/></xml>

When I try to use this with distributed searching, though, it comes back 
written as a normal textfield, like:
<str name="xmlField">&lt;xml-contents-have-been-escaped/&gt;</str>

It looks like it doesn't know anything about my custom fieldtype at all, 
and is defaulting to writing it as a StrField or TextField instead.

So, my question:
- is there a better way to do this?  I'd be fine if it came back with a 
'str' element name, as long as it's not escaped.
- is there perhaps a different class I should extend to do this with 
sharded searching?
- should I just bite the bullet and manually unescape the xml after 
receiving the response?  I'd really prefer not to do this if I can get 
around it.

Thanks in advance for any help.

Peter