[VuFind-Tech] Standalone forward slashes in CallNumber query

[Eoin K. <eki...@gm...>]

Hi,

We have had a tough time getting a particular CalNumber query to behave in
VF4.1.2

Our CallNumber is stored in normalised form in SOLR like this;

"callnumber":["VIRTUAITEM", "MS21F48/5", "21F48/5"]

Our searchspecs.yaml then has a series of munge rules which should take the
a query like;

/Search/Results?lookfor=ms+21+F.+48+%2F+%28005%29&type=CallNumber

i.e. "ms 21 F. 48 / (005)"

and normalise it to make a match. However we were struggling to get a query
with a standalone "/" in it to behave. We eventually tracked the issue down
to;

https://github.com/vufind-org/vufind/blob/master/module/VuFindSearch/src/VuFindSearch/Backend/Solr/LuceneSyntaxHelper.php#L488-L493

This statement was pulling out the freestanding forward slash before the
munge rules were run and so the match couldn't be made.

We have a "workaround" to remove the offending statement but are wary of
the code comment which warns that these (standalone slashes) are bad news.
That said we have tried many combinations of forward slashes in our query
to establish if we can break the indexer and all to no avail.

Cataloging practice in the Library has meant that the forward slash has
significance and the ILS often stores these as stand alone - and this is
the form that is displayed in our ILSHolding tab.

My questions are; Has anyone had bad experiences with standalone slashes?
What edge cases might we be missing?

Thanks for any tips!

Eoin.