Hi Luceners,
I have a particular sorting problem and I wanted some advice on what the
best implementation approach would be. We currently use Lucene as the
searching engine for our vacation rental website. Each vacation rental
property is represented by a single document in Lucene. We want to add a
feature that allows users to sort results by price. The problem is that each
rental property can potentially have a different price for each day. For
example, many rental properties charge more on weekends, or higher rates for
on-season vs. off-season. When a user performs a search, they can specify
the start and end dates of their desired travel, so we should be able to
calculate the total price for that time period for each property by adding
up the price for each day.
I was thinking of implementing this using payloads. Each document would have
a "priceByDate" field and there would be one term stored for each day for
the next 2 years (which is as far out as we support booking a property). The
payload associated with each term would be the price, and then when
searching I could use those payloads as basis for scoring the docs using a
BoostingTermQuery. For example, suppose someone was searching for travel
dates Dec 1 - Dec 5, I would create a query like so:
BooleanQuery query = new BooleanQuery();
query.add(new PriceBoostingTermQuery(new Term("priceByDate", "20081201")),
BooleanClause.Occur.MUST);
query.add(new PriceBoostingTermQuery(new Term("priceByDate", "20081202")),
BooleanClause.Occur.MUST);
query.add(new PriceBoostingTermQuery(new Term("priceByDate", "20081203")),
BooleanClause.Occur.MUST);
query.add(new PriceBoostingTermQuery(new Term("priceByDate", "20081204")),
BooleanClause.Occur.MUST);
PriceBoostingTermQuery would be a subclass of BoostingTermQuery that
overrides getSimilarity() to return a Similarity with a custom scorePayload
method that scores based on the price.
Does this approach sound reasonable? Can anyone think of a better approach?
One thing I don't understand is that the score needs to be the SUM (or the
average) of all the payloads - how does the BooleanQuery handle that? Also,
I need to get the calculated total price back to the caller, and I'm worried
that making priceByDate a stored field will have negative performance
implications. Perhaps there is some way I could just return the calculated
price as the score and then get it from the ScoreDoc?
Thanks for any and all help, and a huge thank you to all the Lucene devs for
a great product. The reason I'm trying to solve this problem in Lucene
instead of a database is because Lucene is so much faster for our queries
and I don't want to add a DB into the mix.
Alex
