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copied!<p>Here's a half-baked "answer". My hope is that it may stimulate your thinking enough for you to come up with a real answer that will work well enough.</p> <p>To me, the notion that the schema (i.e., set of field names) is defined dynamically based on user input is a red flag. I might be reluctant to go so far as to make a blanket statement that one should <em>never</em> do such a thing. But it certainly seems to be something worthy of a second thought.</p> <p>If the fields are user-defined, it would seem to follow that there can be no specific processing knowledge that the system can bring to bear on them. In other words, to the system the fields must simply be generic information containers. Would you agree?</p> <p>So, my thinking would go in the direction of eliminating that aspect of it, one way or another.</p> <p>I wonder if there's a way you could make the actual field names generic (e.g., UserField1, UserField2, etc.), and store elsewhere the per-groupId mapping of user-provided field names to actual field names. It seems as if that would work fine for global searches (where the search query doesn't mention a field name).</p> <p>I do recognize that users would then not be able to simply write a query like [engineer yearsOfExperience>3]. But, come to think of it, could they do that anyway? Do you allow them to define the types of the user-defined fields?</p> <p>Anyway, the sense I have is that these "fields" are factored inappropriately. Somehow the user-defined field names want to be stored as data, not used as dynamic schema.</p>

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