Actually I don't think I'm having trouble-- as I mentioned, my text is *not* stored, so to do highlighting I retrieve the text from the database, apply the appropriate analyzer, and do the highlighting. It seems to be working exactly as it should. My problem was that in a few cases, the document has been removed from the database (but not from the index) so when I queried the database using the identifier for the "best hit" from the index, nothing was being returned. Passing "nothing" to the highlighter resulted in, of course, nothing, so I was getting no highlighted text. Once I updated my index to be in synch with the database, I no longer had any empty returns from the highlighter.
Donna L. Gresh Services Research, Mathematical Sciences Department IBM T.J. Watson Research Center (914) 945-2472 http://www.research.ibm.com/people/g/donnagresh [EMAIL PROTECTED] "Lukas Vlcek" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> 08/15/2007 03:49 PM Please respond to java-user@lucene.apache.org To java-user@lucene.apache.org cc Subject Re: Question about highlighting returning nothing Donna, I have been investigation highlighters in Lucene recently a bit. The humble experience I've learned so far is that highlighting is completely different task from indexing/searching tandem. This simple fact is not obvious to a lot of people. In your particular casue it would be helpful if you can post more technical details about your system settings. Not only it is important if the field to be highlighted is stored but also it is important if you allow for query rewrite and what king of queries you are using (Prefix, Wildcard ... etc). Just my 2 cents. Lukas On 8/15/07, Donna L Gresh <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > > Well, in my case the highlighting was returning nothing because of (my > favorite acronym) PBCAK-- > > I don't store the text in the index, so I have to retrieve it separately > (from a database) for the highlighting, and my database was not in sync > with the index, so in a few cases the document in the index had been > deleted from the database--thus a score, but no document text. > > But I guess my original question remains; under what conditions would the > highlighter return nothing? Only if no terms matched? > > Donna >