Sorting by Record date in search results

[nielsklazenga]

Sorting search results by Record date gives very confusing results. It appears that records with an incomplete or no event date have been given a Record date of 0, so, when sorting on it, records with an incomplete or missing even date end up between the records from before 1 Jan. 1970 and those from after 1 Jan. 1970, instead of at the end or beginning.

See, for example, http:https://avh.ala.org.au/occurrences/search?fq=&pageSize=400&sort=occurrence_date&taxa=Cenchrus%20purpurascens.

[adam-collins]

Still an issue.

[adam-collins]

This can be achieved by adding sortMissingLast="true" to the SOLR schema <fieldType name="date" class="solr.DatePointField" omitNorms="true">.

It will result in all date field searches putting the null values at the end.

• Sorting eventDate desc puts nulls at the end
• Sorting eventDate asc puts nulls at the end

Since we discourage deep paging this should not be an issue. Need other opinions and to see what it does to charts and facet sorting.

[adam-collins]

Facets are unchanged.

Charting is unchanged because ranges are used when not based on facets.

[adam-collins]

See commit gbif/pipelines@72767b1. It might be a long time before this makes it into production.

[nielsklazenga]

Thanks for looking into this @adam-collins.

[adam-collins]

pull request gbif/pipelines#1035