I was trying to index a collection recently, and I kept getting an error when trying to add a value to a particular field. The field in question was defined in schema.xml as an “slong,” indexed, stored, and required. ColdFusion returned a weird error like the following:

Error_while_creating_field_user_cnttypeslongproperties=indexedstoredomitNormssortMissingLast_from_value100__orgapachesolrcommonSolrException_Error_while_creating_field

So even though the value appeared to be a number, Solr was seeing it as something other than a number. It took me a couple of tweaks, but I finally hit upon a solution to the problem – using ColdFusion’s javaCast() function when invoking the addField() method:

<cfset temp.addField("user_cnt", javaCast("long", user_cnt)) />

The underlying problem is that ColdFusion is weakly-typed, and is quite happy to convert strings to numbers and vice versa, while Java is not.