Postings highlighter with multiple values

[Luca Cavanna <ca...@gmail.com>]

Hi,
I would like to use the postings highlighter to highlight a whole field,
therefore I'm using the WholeBreakIterator. But if the field has multiple
values, I get a single snippet (with the chosen multiValuedSeparator
between the different values), while I would like to get a highlighted
snippet per value.

This doesn't seem currently possible and I was wondering if it would make
sense to you to expose the described functionality in Lucene. It would be
enough in my case to have the right hooks exposed, to be able to extend the
current default behaviour.

What I would like to do is
1) change the return type of loadFieldValues, probably to an object (that
might be subclassed if needed)
2) Taking the offsets of the values into account when highlighting, and
consider also the whole field length to properly score the snippets (not
sure if scoring makes a lot of sense here though)

I can definitely provide a patch for this but I would like to hear what you
think first.

Cheers
Luca