Solr 4 contains three field types for spatial search: LatLonType (or its non-geodetic twin PointType), SpatialRecursivePrefixTreeFieldType (RPT for short), and BBoxField (to be introduced in Solr 4.10 onward). LatLonType has been there since Lucene 3. RPT offers more features than LatLonType and offers fast filter performance. LatLonType is more appropriate for efficient distance sorting and boosting. With Solr, we can use both the fields simultaneously—LatLonType for sorting or boosting and RPT for filtering. BBoxField is used for indexing bounding boxes, querying by a box, specifying search predicates such as
Intersects, Within, Contains, Disjoint, or Equals, and relevancy sorting or boosting of properties such as overlapRatio.
We have already seen the LatLonType field, which we used to define the location of our store in the earlier examples. Let us explore RPT and have a look at BBoxField.
