Thanks very much for your response, and for pointing me in the direction
towards Function Queries - you saved me a ton of time! You're right, that
seems to be a much better fit for what I am doing. My responses are below.
On Tue, Oct 7, 2008 at 9:11 PM, Grant Ingersoll <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> Not sure if I fully get it, but bear with me...
>
> Inline below.
>
> On Oct 6, 2008, at 11:37 PM, Alexander Devine wrote:
>
> 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).
>>
>
> Don't you then have to update every document every day?
>
No, I should have been more clear. At any point in time a property has at
most 2 years of future pricing data, and as each day passes there is a day
less of pricing data. We update our documents when our rental owners make a
change to their data, and we also have some automated processes that cause
rental data to be updated, so in general every document gets updated about
every 1-2 months.
>
>
> 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.
>>
>>
>
> I think you would be better off with a Function Query (see the
> org.apache.search.function package), but I am not sure.
>
> How do you calculate the cost of the rental? Is there some way to just
> factor that into the scoring process? I think if you could do this, then
> you could implement a Function Query to do so.
Yep, after looking at the function package this looks exactly like what I
want to do. Essentially each rental has a set of "rate periods" which
specify the rates between specific dates, e.g.
<ratePeriod start="2008-11-01" end="2008-11-21" weeklyPrice="600.00"
midweekPrice="100.00" weekendPrice="125.00"/>
<ratePeriod start="2008-11-21" end="2008-11-30" weeklyPrice="900.00"
midweekPrice="1500.00" weekendPrice="200.00"/>
We want to look at the intersection between the user's desired travel dates
and the ratePeriods to determine the total cost. The thing I like about the
Function queries is this lets us get as arbitrarily complex as we want with
our business rules for the price calculation, and we should be able to tweak
these rules to tradeoff between quoted price accuracy/implementation
simplicity/performance.
Thanks,
Alex
>
>
> You might look at Solr's function query capabilities as well.
>
>
> Alex
>>
>
> --------------------------
> Grant Ingersoll
>
> Lucene Helpful Hints:
> http://wiki.apache.org/lucene-java/BasicsOfPerformance
> http://wiki.apache.org/lucene-java/LuceneFAQ
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
> ---------------------------------------------------------------------
> To unsubscribe, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
> For additional commands, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
>
>
