Class DateField

Provides support for converting dates to strings and vice-versa. The strings are structured so that lexicographic sorting orders by date, which makes them suitable for use as field values and search terms.

Note that this class saves dates with millisecond granularity, which is bad for TermRangeQuery and PrefixQuery, as those queries are expanded to a BooleanQuery with a potentially large number of terms when searching. Thus you might want to use DateTools instead.

Note: dates before 1970 cannot be used, and therefore cannot be indexed when using this class. See DateTools for an alternative without such a limitation.

Another approach is Lucene.Net.Util.NumericUtils, which provides a sortable binary representation (prefix encoded) of numeric values, which date/time are. For indexing a , convert it to unix timestamp as long and index this as a numeric value with NumericField and use NumericRangeQuery<T> to query it.