Sorting results by function values

Consider a situation where you have an application that stores the list of publishing houses in the index and allows users to search it. Added to the situation, you are more concerned about the publishers that are located near the point where you reside and where you are currently searching the information. In this case, you need some feature that you need to sort your search result based on the distance from a geographical point. Can Solr help you achieve this? The answer is yes, and we will demonstrate how we can achieve it in this section.

This section uses geospatial search. Thus, if you are not familiar with geospatial search, we recommend that you refer to the Geospatial Search section covered in Chapter 1, Searching Data, Administrating Solr, Packt Publishing.

Let us now start with the actual activity by adding the following index structure in the fields section of our schema.xml file:

<field name="p_id" type="string" indexed="true" stored="true...