non-intuitive date-only search

[bcampbell]

When searching a date/time field for, say, a particular date, the 'intuitive' approach doesn't work:

pubdate:2011-02-01

You currently have to use range syntax:
pubdate: [2011-02-01 TO 2011-02-01]

This is pretty sucky. The problem is that the parser has to know if it's generating a straight term query or a range query. It doesn't know what type each field is.

Two ideas I have on how to approach this:

1. add a setting to the query parser which lets you specific which fields are numeric (or date/time).
2. treat anything that looks like a date/time as a range query.

I think 2 falls down because it's perfectly reasonable to index YYYY-MM-DD strings in a string field, and they won't be matched properly if the query parser assumes it's a numeric field.

So I'm leaning toward solution 1 right now.
I'm thinking that there should be options to tell the query parser more about the fields anyway - for example so it can throw up a syntax error if an unknown field is entered (or mis-spelled). So specifying a field type doesn't seem like too big a leap from this.