If all you want to do is find docs containing dates within a range, it probably doesn't make much difference whether you give dates their own field or put them into your content field. It'll probably be easier to just add them into the token stream since that's the way the analyzer architecture wants to work (analyzers generally don't know anything about fields.) You can make the position increment work if you want, and it'll make phrase/span queries work better, if you need those to work.
What is going to matter in either case is how you format dates. Everything in Lucene is text, so if you want to do date ranges (which you mentioned in your first e-mail), you need to be careful how you format the dates and what kinds of queries you use. See, for example, http://lucene.apache.org/java/docs/api/org/apache/lucene/document/DateTo ols.html (tinyurl: http://tinyurl.com/ejlvx) and http://wiki.apache.org/jakarta-lucene/LargeScaleDateRangeProcessing (tinyurl: http://tinyurl.com/2pubaq) There are also date filters (as opposed to date queries) that have different tradeoffs. Dates are kinda tricky in Lucene. -----Original Message----- From: Walt Stoneburner [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Thursday, March 01, 2007 7:54 AM To: java-user@lucene.apache.org Subject: Re: Soliciting Design Thoughts on Date Searching Thank you all for the suggestions steering me down the right path. As an aside, the easy part, at least for me, is extracting the dates -- Peter was dead on about how doing that: heuristics, multiple regular expressions, and data structures. As Steve pointed out, this isn't as trivial as it sounds - there are a lot of formats, some ambiguous. I love writing parsers (guess I'm sick in the head, eh?), so getting the data isn't the problem, it's knowing what format to convert it into and how to hand it to Lucene in a way that it'll find meaningful for searching. I had pondered making a single field with a value like: document.add( Field.Text( "dates", "27-Feb-1968,04-Jul-1776,01-Mar-2007" )); ...but I wasn't convinced that the Lucene date Range was going to work on anything other than a Date type, rather than a string of text that just coincidently happened to contain dates. Drawing back on my title example, I was under the incorrect impression that if I had a field and provided another value that it replaced the prior value. Hoss is indicating this is not so, and that I'm safe adding additional values. document.add( Field.Text( "title", "Thanks Thomas" )); document.add( Field.Text( "title", "Thanks Hoss" ) ); // Does not stomp on Thomas. Yay! If I can use this technique to pile in a ton of dates, then I'm totally happy, you guys have pointed me in the right direction; celebrations all around. The brain scratcher, for me, was Peter's treating the dates like a synonym -- a clever way of looking at the problem. Unfortunately, that'd be giving me too much credit, as I haven't played with that feature set of Lucene. So, without trying to, Peter's sent me scrambling back to the API for something I wasn't aware was there. Steve adds to the mystery by suggesting a delimited field list, much like the example at the top of this message, and likewise doing some trickery with the token stream and a position increment of zero -- again, a clever solution, and likewise beyond my limited Lucene experience. While I know, intellectually, that Lucene is digesting positioned tokens, it is so well designed that fools like me can legitimately use Lucene for long periods of time without actually being exposed to what's happening under the hood. The ponderance I now contemplate as a newbie (I've downgraded my self assessment after this discussion) is knowing whether the token-stream solution or the multiple-add solution is the pedantic one. Are there performance advantages to one way over the other? I'll be totally stunned if someone offers up that they're logically the same thing. I swear, conversing with you guys is giving me a very deep sense of appreciation for your skills and Lucene's capabilities. -wls --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] For additional commands, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] For additional commands, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
