Hibernate Search

Apache Lucene™
Integration

Reference Guide
4.5.3.Final

by Emmanuel Bernard, Hardy Ferentschik, Gustavo Fernandes,

Sanne Grinovero, Nabeel Ali Memon, and Gunnar Morling
Preface ............................................................................................................................ vii
1. Getting started ............................................................................................................. 1
1.1. System Requirements ......................................................................................... 1
1.2. Using Maven ...................................................................................................... 2
1.3. Configuration ...................................................................................................... 3
1.4. Indexing ............................................................................................................. 6
1.5. Searching ........................................................................................................... 7
1.6. Analyzer ............................................................................................................. 8
1.7. What's next ........................................................................................................ 9
2. Architecture ............................................................................................................... 11
2.1. Overview .......................................................................................................... 11
2.2. Back end .......................................................................................................... 12
2.2.1. Lucene .................................................................................................. 12
2.2.2. JMS ....................................................................................................... 13
2.2.3. JGroups ................................................................................................. 14
2.3. Reader strategy ................................................................................................ 15
2.3.1. shared .................................................................................................. 15
2.3.2. not-shared ........................................................................................... 15
2.3.3. Custom .................................................................................................. 15
3. Configuration ............................................................................................................. 17
3.1. Enabling Hibernate Search and automatic indexing ............................................. 17
3.1.1. Enabling Hibernate Search ..................................................................... 17
3.1.2. Automatic indexing ................................................................................. 17
3.2. Configuring the IndexManager ........................................................................... 17
3.2.1. directory-based .................................................................................. 18
3.2.2. near-real-time .................................................................................... 18
3.2.3. Custom .................................................................................................. 18
3.3. Directory configuration ....................................................................................... 19
3.3.1. Infinispan Directory configuration ............................................................. 23
3.4. Worker configuration ......................................................................................... 25
3.4.1. JMS Master/Slave back end ................................................................... 28
3.4.2. JGroups Master/Slave back end .............................................................. 31
3.5. Reader strategy configuration ............................................................................ 35
3.6. Exception handling ............................................................................................ 35
3.7. Lucene configuration ......................................................................................... 36
3.7.1. Tuning indexing performance .................................................................. 36
3.7.2. LockFactory configuration ....................................................................... 42
3.7.3. Index format compatibility ....................................................................... 44
3.8. Metadata API .................................................................................................... 45
3.9. Hibernate Search as a WildFly module ............................................................... 45
4. Mapping entities to the index structure ..................................................................... 47
4.1. Mapping an entity ............................................................................................. 47
4.1.1. Basic mapping ....................................................................................... 47
4.1.2. Mapping properties multiple times ........................................................... 52

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Hibernate Search

4.1.3. Embedded and associated objects .......................................................... 53

4.2. Boosting ........................................................................................................... 59
4.2.1. Static index time boosting ....................................................................... 59
4.2.2. Dynamic index time boosting .................................................................. 60
4.3. Analysis ............................................................................................................ 61
4.3.1. Default analyzer and analyzer by class .................................................... 61
4.3.2. Named analyzers ................................................................................... 62
4.3.3. Dynamic analyzer selection ..................................................................... 68
4.3.4. Retrieving an analyzer ............................................................................ 69
4.4. Bridges ............................................................................................................. 70
4.4.1. Built-in bridges ....................................................................................... 70
4.4.2. Tika bridge ............................................................................................ 72
4.4.3. Custom bridges ...................................................................................... 73
4.5. Conditional indexing: to index or not based on entity state ................................... 78
4.6. Providing your own id ....................................................................................... 81
4.6.1. The ProvidedId annotation ...................................................................... 81
4.7. Programmatic API ............................................................................................. 82
4.7.1. Mapping an entity as indexable ............................................................... 84
4.7.2. Adding DocumentId to indexed entity ...................................................... 84
4.7.3. Defining analyzers .................................................................................. 85
4.7.4. Defining full text filter definitions .............................................................. 86
4.7.5. Defining fields for indexing ...................................................................... 88
4.7.6. Programmatically defining embedded entities ........................................... 89
4.7.7. Contained In definition ............................................................................ 90
4.7.8. Date/Calendar Bridge ............................................................................. 91
4.7.9. Defining bridges ..................................................................................... 92
4.7.10. Mapping class bridge ............................................................................ 93
4.7.11. Mapping dynamic boost ........................................................................ 94
5. Querying .................................................................................................................... 97
5.1. Building queries ................................................................................................ 99
5.1.1. Building a Lucene query using the Lucene API ......................................... 99
5.1.2. Building a Lucene query with the Hibernate Search query DSL .................. 99
5.1.3. Building a Hibernate Search query ........................................................ 106
5.2. Retrieving the results ...................................................................................... 113
5.2.1. Performance considerations .................................................................. 113
5.2.2. Result size ........................................................................................... 114
5.2.3. ResultTransformer ................................................................................ 115
5.2.4. Understanding results ........................................................................... 115
5.3. Filters ............................................................................................................. 116
5.3.1. Using filters in a sharded environment ................................................... 120
5.4. Faceting ......................................................................................................... 121
5.4.1. Creating a faceting request ................................................................... 123
5.4.2. Setting the facet sort order ................................................................... 125
5.4.3. Applying a faceting request ................................................................... 125

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 5.4.4. Interpreting a Facet result .................................................................... 126
5.4.5. Restricting query results ....................................................................... 127
5.5. Optimizing the query process ........................................................................... 128
5.5.1. Caching index values: FieldCache ......................................................... 128
6. Manual index changes ............................................................................................. 131
6.1. Adding instances to the index .......................................................................... 131
6.2. Deleting instances from the index .................................................................... 131
6.3. Rebuilding the whole index .............................................................................. 132
6.3.1. Using flushToIndexes() ......................................................................... 133
6.3.2. Using a MassIndexer ............................................................................ 133
6.3.3. Useful parameters for batch indexing ..................................................... 137
7. Index Optimization ................................................................................................... 139
7.1. Automatic optimization ..................................................................................... 140
7.2. Manual optimization ........................................................................................ 141
7.3. Adjusting optimization ...................................................................................... 141
8. Monitoring ................................................................................................................ 143
8.1. JMX ............................................................................................................... 143
8.1.1. StatisticsInfoMBean .............................................................................. 143
8.1.2. IndexControlMBean .............................................................................. 143
8.1.3. IndexingProgressMonitorMBean ............................................................ 143
9. Spatial ...................................................................................................................... 145
9.1. Enable indexing of Spatial Coordinates ............................................................ 145
9.1.1. Indexing coordinates for Double Range Queries ..................................... 145
9.1.2. Indexing coordinates in a Grid with Quad Trees ...................................... 146
9.1.3. Implementing the Coordinates interface ................................................. 147
9.2. Performing Spatial Queries .............................................................................. 148
9.2.1. Returning distance to query point in the search results ............................ 149
9.3. Multiple Coordinate pairs ................................................................................. 151
9.4. Insight: implementation details of Quad Tree indexing ....................................... 152
9.4.1. At indexing level ................................................................................... 152
9.4.2. At search level ..................................................................................... 153
10. Advanced features ................................................................................................. 157
10.1. Accessing the SearchFactory ......................................................................... 157
10.2. Using an IndexReader ................................................................................... 157
10.3. Accessing a Lucene Directory ........................................................................ 158
10.4. Sharding indexes .......................................................................................... 158
10.4.1. Static sharding ................................................................................... 159
10.4.2. Dynamic sharding ............................................................................... 159
10.5. Sharing indexes ............................................................................................ 161
10.6. Using external services .................................................................................. 161
10.6.1. Exposing a service ............................................................................. 162
10.6.2. Using a service .................................................................................. 163
10.7. Customizing Lucene's scoring formula ............................................................ 164
11. Further reading ...................................................................................................... 167

v
vi
Preface

Full text search engines like Apache Lucene are very powerful technologies to add efficient
free text search capabilities to applications. However, Lucene suffers several mismatches when
dealing with object domain models. Amongst other things indexes have to be kept up to date and
mismatches between index structure and domain model as well as query mismatches have to
be avoided.

Hibernate Search addresses these shortcomings - it indexes your domain model with the help
of a few annotations, takes care of database/index synchronization and brings back regular
managed objects from free text queries. To achieve this Hibernate Search is combining the power
of Hibernate [http://www.hibernate.org] and Apache Lucene [http://lucene.apache.org].

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viii
Chapter 1.

Getting started
Welcome to Hibernate Search. The following chapter will guide you through the initial steps
required to integrate Hibernate Search into an existing Hibernate enabled application. In case you
are a Hibernate new timer we recommend you start here [http://hibernate.org/quick-start.html].

1.1. System Requirements

Table 1.1. System requirements

Java Runtime A JDK or JRE version 6 or

greater. You can download a
Java Runtime for Windows/Linux/Solaris
here [http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/java/
javase/downloads/index.html]. If using Java
version 7 make sure you avoid builds 0 and 1:
those versions contained an optimisation bug
which would be triggered by Lucene. Hibernate
Search 3.x was compatible with Java version 5.
Hibernate Search hibernate-search-4.5.3.Final.jar and
all runtime dependencies. You can
get the jar artifacts either from the
dist/lib directory of the Hibernate
Search distribution [http://sourceforge.net/
projects/hibernate/files/hibernate-search/] or
you can download them from the JBoss
maven repository [http://repository.jboss.org/
nexus/content/groups/public-jboss/ ].
Hibernate Core You will need hibernate-
core-4.3.6.Final.jar and its transitive
dependencies (either from the
distribution bundle [http://sourceforge.net/
projects/hibernate/files/hibernate3/] or the
maven repository).
JPA 2.1 Even though Hibernate Search can
be used without JPA annotations the
following instructions will use them
for basic entity configuration (@Entity,
@Id, @OneToMany,...). This part of the
configuration could also be expressed in xml or
code.

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Chapter 1. Getting started

Hibernate Search, however, has also its own

set of annotations (@Indexed, @DocumentId,
@Field,...) for which there exists so far no
XML based alternative; a better option is the
Section 4.7, “Programmatic API”.

1.2. Using Maven

The Hibernate Search artifacts can be found in Maven's central repository but are released first
in the JBoss maven repository [http://repository.jboss.org/nexus/content/groups/public-jboss/ ].
So it's not a requirement but we recommend to add this repository to your settings.xml file
(see also Maven Getting Started [http://community.jboss.org/wiki/MavenGettingStarted-Users] for
more details).

This is all you need to add to your pom.xml to get started:

Example 1.1. Maven artifact identifier for Hibernate Search

<dependency>
<groupId>org.hibernate</groupId>
<artifactId>hibernate-search</artifactId>
<version>4.5.3.Final</version>
</dependency>

Example 1.2. Optional Maven dependencies for Hibernate Search

<dependency>
<!-- If using JPA (2), add: -->
<dependency>
<groupId>org.hibernate</groupId>
<artifactId>hibernate-entitymanager</artifactId>
<version>4.3.6.Final</version>
</dependency>
<!-- Additional Analyzers: -->
<dependency>
<groupId>org.hibernate</groupId>
<artifactId>hibernate-search-analyzers</artifactId>
<version>4.5.3.Final</version>
</dependency>
<!-- Infinispan integration: -->
<dependency>
<groupId>org.hibernate</groupId>
<artifactId>hibernate-search-infinispan</artifactId>
<version>4.5.3.Final</version>
</dependency>

Only the hibernate-search dependency is mandatory. hibernate-entitymanager is only required if

you want to use Hibernate Search in conjunction with JPA.

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 Configuration

To use hibernate-search-infinispan, adding the JBoss Maven repository is mandatory, because it

contains the needed Infinispan dependencies which are currently not mirrored by central.

1.3. Configuration
Once you have downloaded and added all required dependencies to your application you have to
add a couple of properties to your hibernate configuration file. If you are using Hibernate directly
this can be done in hibernate.properties or hibernate.cfg.xml. If you are using Hibernate
via JPA you can also add the properties to persistence.xml. The good news is that for standard
use most properties offer a sensible default. An example persistence.xml configuration could
look like this:

Example 1.3. Basic configuration options to be added to hibernate.properties,

hibernate.cfg.xml or persistence.xml

...
<property name="hibernate.search.default.directory_provider"
value="filesystem"/>

<property name="hibernate.search.default.indexBase"
value="/var/lucene/indexes"/>
...

First you have to tell Hibernate Search which DirectoryProvider to use. This can be achieved
by setting the hibernate.search.default.directory_provider property. Apache Lucene has
the notion of a Directory to store the index files. Hibernate Search handles the initialization
and configuration of a Lucene Directory instance via a DirectoryProvider. In this tutorial
we will use a a directory provider storing the index in the file system. This will give us
the ability to physically inspect the Lucene indexes created by Hibernate Search (eg via
Luke [http://code.google.com/p/luke/]). Once you have a working configuration you can start
experimenting with other directory providers (see Section 3.3, “Directory configuration”). Next
to the directory provider you also have to specify the default base directory for all indexes via
hibernate.search.default.indexBase.

Lets assume that your application contains the Hibernate managed classes example.Book and
example.Author and you want to add free text search capabilities to your application in order to
search the books contained in your database.

Example 1.4. Example entities Book and Author before adding Hibernate
Search specific annotations

package example;
...
@Entity
public class Book {

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Chapter 1. Getting started

@Id
@GeneratedValue
private Integer id;

private String title;

private String subtitle;

@ManyToMany
private Set<Author> authors = new HashSet<Author>();

private Date publicationDate;

public Book() {}

// standard getters/setters follow here

...
}

package example;
...
@Entity
public class Author {

@Id
@GeneratedValue
private Integer id;

private String name;

public Author() {}

// standard getters/setters follow here

...
}

To achieve this you have to add a few annotations to the Book and Author class. The first
annotation @Indexed marks Book as indexable. By design Hibernate Search needs to store an
untokenized id in the index to ensure index unicity for a given entity. @DocumentId marks the
property to use for this purpose and is in most cases the same as the database primary key. The
@DocumentId annotation is optional in the case where an @Id annotation exists.

Next you have to mark the fields you want to make searchable. Let's start with title and
subtitle and annotate both with @Field. The parameter index=Index.YES will ensure that the
text will be indexed, while analyze=Analyze.YES ensures that the text will be analyzed using the
default Lucene analyzer. Usually, analyzing means chunking a sentence into individual words and
potentially excluding common words like 'a' or 'the'. We will talk more about analyzers a little
later on. The third parameter we specify within @Field, store=Store.NO, ensures that the actual
data will not be stored in the index. Whether this data is stored in the index or not has nothing
to do with the ability to search for it. From Lucene's perspective it is not necessary to keep the

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 Configuration

data once the index is created. The benefit of storing it is the ability to retrieve it via projections
( see Section 5.1.3.5, “Projection”).

Without projections, Hibernate Search will per default execute a Lucene query in order to find the
database identifiers of the entities matching the query critera and use these identifiers to retrieve
managed objects from the database. The decision for or against projection has to be made on
a case to case basis. The default behaviour is recommended since it returns managed objects
whereas projections only return object arrays.

Note that index=Index.YES, analyze=Analyze.YES and store=Store.NO are the default values
for these paramters and could be ommited.

After this short look under the hood let's go back to annotating the Book class. Another annotation
we have not yet discussed is @DateBridge. This annotation is one of the built-in field bridges in
Hibernate Search. The Lucene index is purely string based. For this reason Hibernate Search must
convert the data types of the indexed fields to strings and vice versa. A range of predefined bridges
are provided, including the DateBridge which will convert a java.util.Date into a String with
the specified resolution. For more details see Section 4.4, “Bridges”.

This leaves us with @IndexedEmbedded. This annotation is used to index associated entities
(@ManyToMany, @*ToOne, @Embedded and @ElementCollection) as part of the owning entity. This
is needed since a Lucene index document is a flat data structure which does not know anything
about object relations. To ensure that the authors' name will be searchable you have to make
sure that the names are indexed as part of the book itself. On top of @IndexedEmbedded you will
also have to mark all fields of the associated entity you want to have included in the index with
@Indexed. For more details see Section 4.1.3, “Embedded and associated objects”.

These settings should be sufficient for now. For more details on entity mapping refer to Section 4.1,
“Mapping an entity”.

Example 1.5. Example entities after adding Hibernate Search annotations

package example;
...
@Entity
@Indexed
public class Book {

@Id
@GeneratedValue
private Integer id;

@Field(index=Index.YES, analyze=Analyze.YES, store=Store.NO)

private String title;

@Field(index=Index.YES, analyze=Analyze.YES, store=Store.NO)

private String subtitle;

@Field(index = Index.YES, analyze=Analyze.NO, store = Store.YES)

@DateBridge(resolution = Resolution.DAY)

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Chapter 1. Getting started

private Date publicationDate;

@IndexedEmbedded
@ManyToMany
private Set<Author> authors = new HashSet<Author>();

public Book() {
}

// standard getters/setters follow here

...
}

package example;
...
@Entity
public class Author {

@Id
@GeneratedValue
private Integer id;

@Field
private String name;

public Author() {
}

// standard getters/setters follow here

...
}

1.4. Indexing
Hibernate Search will transparently index every entity persisted, updated or removed through
Hibernate Core. However, you have to create an initial Lucene index for the data already present
in your database. Once you have added the above properties and annotations it is time to trigger
an initial batch index of your books. You can achieve this by using one of the following code
snippets (see also Section 6.3, “Rebuilding the whole index”):

Example 1.6. Using Hibernate Session to index data

FullTextSession fullTextSession = Search.getFullTextSession(session);

fullTextSession.createIndexer().startAndWait();

Example 1.7. Using JPA to index data

EntityManager em = entityManagerFactory.createEntityManager();

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 Searching

FullTextEntityManager fullTextEntityManager = Search.getFullTextEntityManager(em);

fullTextEntityManager.createIndexer().startAndWait();

After executing the above code, you should be able to see a Lucene index under /var/lucene/
indexes/example.Book. Go ahead an inspect this index with Luke [http://code.google.com/p/
luke/]. It will help you to understand how Hibernate Search works.

1.5. Searching
Now it is time to execute a first search. The general approach is to create a Lucene query,
either via the Lucene API (Section 5.1.1, “Building a Lucene query using the Lucene API”) or
via the Hibernate Search query DSL (Section 5.1.2, “Building a Lucene query with the Hibernate
Search query DSL”), and then wrap this query into a org.hibernate.Query in order to get all
the functionality one is used to from the Hibernate API. The following code will prepare a query
against the indexed fields, execute it and return a list of Books.

Example 1.8. Using Hibernate Session to create and execute a search

FullTextSession fullTextSession = Search.getFullTextSession(session);

Transaction tx = fullTextSession.beginTransaction();

// create native Lucene query unsing the query DSL

// alternatively you can write the Lucene query using the Lucene query parser
// or the Lucene programmatic API. The Hibernate Search DSL is recommended though
QueryBuilder qb = fullTextSession.getSearchFactory()
.buildQueryBuilder().forEntity(Book.class).get();
org.apache.lucene.search.Query query = qb
.keyword()
.onFields("title", "subtitle", "authors.name")
.matching("Java rocks!")
.createQuery();

// wrap Lucene query in a org.hibernate.Query

org.hibernate.Query hibQuery =
fullTextSession.createFullTextQuery(query, Book.class);

// execute search
List result = hibQuery.list();

tx.commit();
session.close();

Example 1.9. Using JPA to create and execute a search

EntityManager em = entityManagerFactory.createEntityManager();
FullTextEntityManager fullTextEntityManager =
org.hibernate.search.jpa.Search.getFullTextEntityManager(em);
em.getTransaction().begin();

// create native Lucene query unsing the query DSL

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Chapter 1. Getting started

// alternatively you can write the Lucene query using the Lucene query parser
// or the Lucene programmatic API. The Hibernate Search DSL is recommended though
QueryBuilder qb = fullTextEntityManager.getSearchFactory()
.buildQueryBuilder().forEntity(Book.class).get();
org.apache.lucene.search.Query query = qb
.keyword()
.onFields("title", "subtitle", "authors.name")
.matching("Java rocks!")
.createQuery();

// wrap Lucene query in a javax.persistence.Query

javax.persistence.Query persistenceQuery =
fullTextEntityManager.createFullTextQuery(query, Book.class);

// execute search
List result = persistenceQuery.getResultList();

em.getTransaction().commit();
em.close();

1.6. Analyzer
Let's make things a little more interesting now. Assume that one of your indexed book entities
has the title "Refactoring: Improving the Design of Existing Code" and you want to get hits for all
of the following queries: "refactor", "refactors", "refactored" and "refactoring". In Lucene this can
be achieved by choosing an analyzer class which applies word stemming during the indexing as
well as the search process. Hibernate Search offers several ways to configure the analyzer to be
used (see Section 4.3.1, “Default analyzer and analyzer by class”):

• Setting the hibernate.search.analyzer property in the configuration file. The specified class
will then be the default analyzer.

• Setting the @Analyzer annotation at the entity level.

• Setting the @Analyzer annotation at the field level.

When using the @Analyzer annotation one can either specify the fully qualified classname of
the analyzer to use or one can refer to an analyzer definition defined by the @AnalyzerDef
annotation. In the latter case the Solr analyzer framework with its factories approach is
utilized. To find out more about the factory classes available you can either browse the
Solr JavaDoc or read the corresponding section on the Solr Wiki. [http://wiki.apache.org/solr/
AnalyzersTokenizersTokenFilters]

In the example below a StandardTokenizerFactory is used followed by two filter factories,

LowerCaseFilterFactory and SnowballPorterFilterFactory. The standard tokenizer splits
words at punctuation characters and hyphens while keeping email addresses and internet
hostnames intact. It is a good general purpose tokenizer. The lowercase filter lowercases the
letters in each token whereas the snowball filter finally applies language specific stemming.

Generally, when using the Solr framework you have to start with a tokenizer followed by an
arbitrary number of filters.

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 What's next

Example 1.10. Using @AnalyzerDef and the Solr framework to define and use
an analyzer

@Entity
@Indexed
@AnalyzerDef(name = "customanalyzer",
tokenizer = @TokenizerDef(factory = StandardTokenizerFactory.class),
filters = {
@TokenFilterDef(factory = LowerCaseFilterFactory.class),
@TokenFilterDef(factory = SnowballPorterFilterFactory.class, params = {
@Parameter(name = "language", value = "English")
})
})
public class Book {

@Id
@GeneratedValue
@DocumentId
private Integer id;

@Field
@Analyzer(definition = "customanalyzer")
private String title;

@Field
@Analyzer(definition = "customanalyzer")
private String subtitle;

@IndexedEmbedded
@ManyToMany
private Set<Author> authors = new HashSet<Author>();

@Field(index = Index.YES, analyze = Analyze.NO, store = Store.YES)

@DateBridge(resolution = Resolution.DAY)
private Date publicationDate;

public Book() {
}

// standard getters/setters follow here

...
}

Using @AnalyzerDef only defines an Analyzer, you still have to apply it to entities and or properties
using @Analyzer. Like in the above example the customanalyzer is defined but not applied on
the entity: it's applied on the title and subtitle properties only. An analyzer definition is global,
so you can define it on any entity and reuse the definition on other entities.

1.7. What's next

The above paragraphs helped you getting an overview of Hibernate Search. The next step after
this tutorial is to get more familiar with the overall architecture of Hibernate Search (Chapter 2,
Architecture) and explore the basic features in more detail. Two topics which were only briefly

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Chapter 1. Getting started

touched in this tutorial were analyzer configuration (Section 4.3.1, “Default analyzer and analyzer
by class”) and field bridges (Section 4.4, “Bridges”). Both are important features required for
more fine-grained indexing. More advanced topics cover clustering (Section 3.4.1, “JMS Master/
Slave back end”, Section 3.3.1, “Infinispan Directory configuration”) and large index handling
(Section 10.4, “Sharding indexes”).

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Chapter 2.

Architecture
2.1. Overview
Hibernate Search consists of an indexing component as well as an index search component. Both
are backed by Apache Lucene.

Each time an entity is inserted, updated or removed in/from the database, Hibernate Search keeps
track of this event (through the Hibernate event system) and schedules an index update. All these
updates are handled without you having to interact with the Apache Lucene APIs directly (see
Section 3.1, “Enabling Hibernate Search and automatic indexing”). Instead, the interaction with
the underlying Lucene indexes is handled via so called IndexManagers.

Each Lucene index is managed by one index manager which is uniquely identified by name.
In most cases there is also a one to one relationship between an indexed entity and a single
IndexManager. The exceptions are the use cases of index sharding and index sharing. The former
can be applied when the index for a single entity becomes too big and indexing operations are
slowing down the application. In this case a single entity is indexed into multiple indexes each with
its own index manager (see Section 10.4, “Sharding indexes”). The latter, index sharing, is the
ability to index multiple entities into the same Lucene index (see Section 10.5, “Sharing indexes”).

The index manager abstracts from the specific index configuration. In the case of the default index
manager this includes details about the selected backend, the configured reader strategy and
the chosen DirectoryProvider. These components will be discussed in greater detail later on.
It is recommended that you start with the default index manager which uses different Lucene
Directory types to manage the indexes (see Section 3.3, “Directory configuration”). You can,
however, also provide your own IndexManager implementation (see Section 3.2, “Configuring the
IndexManager”).

Once the index is created, you can search for entities and return lists of managed entities saving
you the tedious object to Lucene Document mapping. The same persistence context is shared
between Hibernate and Hibernate Search. As a matter of fact, the FullTextSession is built on top
of the Hibernate Session so that the application code can use the unified org.hibernate.Query
or javax.persistence.Query APIs exactly the same way a HQL, JPA-QL or native query would
do.

To be more efficient Hibernate Search batches the write interactions with the Lucene index. This
batching is the responsibility of the Worker. There are currently two types of batching. Outside a
transaction, the index update operation is executed right after the actual database operation. This
is really a no batching setup. In the case of an ongoing transaction, the index update operation
is scheduled for the transaction commit phase and discarded in case of transaction rollback. The
batching scope is the transaction. There are two immediate benefits:

• Performance: Lucene indexing works better when operation are executed in batch.

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Chapter 2. Architecture

• ACIDity: The work executed has the same scoping as the one executed by the database
transaction and is executed if and only if the transaction is committed. This is not ACID in the
strict sense of it, but ACID behavior is rarely useful for full text search indexes since they can
be rebuilt from the source at any time.

You can think of those two batch modes (no scope vs transactional) as the equivalent of
the (infamous) autocommit vs transactional behavior. From a performance perspective, the
in transaction mode is recommended. The scoping choice is made transparently. Hibernate
Search detects the presence of a transaction and adjust the scoping (see Section 3.4, “Worker
configuration”).

Tip

It is recommended - for both your database and Hibernate Search - to execute

your operations in a transaction, be it JDBC or JTA.

Note

Hibernate Search works perfectly fine in the Hibernate / EntityManager long

conversation pattern aka. atomic conversation.

2.2. Back end

Hibernate Search offers the ability to let the batched work being processed by different back
ends. Several back ends are provided out of the box and you have the option to plugin your
own. It is important to understand that in this context back end encompasses more than just the
configuration option hibernate.search.default.worker.backend. This property just specifies
a implementation of the BackendQueueProcessor interface which is a part of a back end
configuration. In most cases, however, additional configuration settings are needed to successfully
configure a specific backend setup, like for example the JMS back end.

2.2.1. Lucene

In this mode, all index update operations applied on a given node (JVM) will be executed to the
Lucene directories (through the directory providers) by the same node. This mode is typically used
in non clustered environment or in clustered environments where the directory store is shared.

12
 JMS

Lucene back end configuration.

This mode targets non clustered applications, or clustered applications where the Directory is
taking care of the locking strategy.

The main advantage is simplicity and immediate visibility of the changes in Lucene queries (a
requirement in some applications).

An alternative back end viable for non-clustered and non-shared index configurations is the near-
real-time backend.

2.2.2. JMS

All index update operations applied on a given node are sent to a JMS queue. A unique reader
will then process the queue and update the master index. The master index is then replicated on
a regular basis to the slave copies. This is known as the master/slaves pattern. The master is
the sole responsible for updating the Lucene index. The slaves can accept read as well as write
operations. However, they only process the read operation on their local index copy and delegate
the update operations to the master.

13
Chapter 2. Architecture

JMS back end configuration.

This mode targets clustered environments where throughput is critical, and index update delays
are affordable. Reliability is ensured by the JMS provider and by having the slaves working on
a local copy of the index.

2.2.3. JGroups

The JGroups based back end works similar to the JMS one and is designed after the same master/
slave pattern. However, instead of JMS the JGroups toolkit is used as a replication mechanism.
This back end can be used as an alternative to JMS when response time is critical, but i.e. JNDI
service is not available.

Note that while JMS can usually be configured to use persistent queues, JGroups talks directly
to other nodes over network. Message delivery to other reachable nodes is guaranteed, but if no
master node is available, index operations are silently discarded. This backend can be configured
to use asynchronous messages, or to wait for each indexing operation to be completed on the
remote node before returning.

The JGroups backend can be configured with static master or slave roles, or can be setup
to perform an auto-election of the master. This mode is particularly useful to have the system
automatically pick a new master in case of failure, but during a reelection process some indexing

14
 Reader strategy

operations might be lost. For this reason this mode is not suited for use cases requiring strong
consistency guarantees. When configured to perform an automatic election, the master node is
defined as an hash on the index name: the role is therefore possibly different for each index or
shard.

2.3. Reader strategy

When executing a query, Hibernate Search interacts with the Apache Lucene indexes through a
reader strategy. Choosing a reader strategy will depend on the profile of the application (frequent
updates, read mostly, asynchronous index update etc). See also Section 3.5, “Reader strategy
configuration”

2.3.1. shared
With this strategy, Hibernate Search will share the same IndexReader, for a given Lucene index,
across multiple queries and threads provided that the IndexReader is still up-to-date. If the
IndexReader is not up-to-date, a new one is opened and provided. Each IndexReader is made
of several SegmentReaders. This strategy only reopens segments that have been modified or
created after last opening and shares the already loaded segments from the previous instance.
This strategy is the default.

The name of this strategy is shared.

2.3.2. not-shared
Every time a query is executed, a Lucene IndexReader is opened. This strategy is not the most
efficient since opening and warming up an IndexReader can be a relatively expensive operation.

The name of this strategy is not-shared.

2.3.3. Custom
You can write your own reader strategy that suits your application needs by implementing
org.hibernate.search.reader.ReaderProvider. The implementation must be thread safe.

15
16
Chapter 3.

Configuration
3.1. Enabling Hibernate Search and automatic indexing
Let's start with the most basic configuration question - how do I enable Hibernate Search?

3.1.1. Enabling Hibernate Search

The good news is that Hibernate Search is enabled out of the box when detected
on the classpath by Hibernate Core. If, for some reason you need to disable it, set
hibernate.search.autoregister_listeners to false. Note that there is no performance
penalty when the listeners are enabled but no entities are annotated as indexed.

3.1.2. Automatic indexing

By default, every time an object is inserted, updated or deleted through Hibernate, Hibernate
Search updates the according Lucene index. It is sometimes desirable to disable that features
if either your index is read-only or if index updates are done in a batch way (see Section 6.3,
“Rebuilding the whole index”).

To disable event based indexing, set

hibernate.search.indexing_strategy = manual

Note

In most case, the JMS backend provides the best of both world, a lightweight
event based system keeps track of all changes in the system, and the heavyweight
indexing process is done by a separate process or machine.

3.2. Configuring the IndexManager

The role of the index manager component is described in Chapter 2, Architecture. Hibernate
Search provides two possible implementations for this interface to choose from.

• directory-based: the default implementation which uses the Lucene Directory abstraction
to manage index files.

• near-real-time: avoid flushing writes to disk at each commit. This index manager is also
Directory based, but also makes uses of Lucene's NRT functionality.

To select an alternative you specify the property:

17
Chapter 3. Configuration

hibernate.search.[default|<indexname>].indexmanager = near-real-time

3.2.1. directory-based

The default IndexManager implementation. This is the one mostly referred to in this
documentation. It is highly configurable and allows you to select different settings for the reader
strategy, back ends and directory providers. Refer to Section 3.3, “Directory configuration”,
Section 3.4, “Worker configuration” and Section 3.5, “Reader strategy configuration” for more
details.

3.2.2. near-real-time

The NRTIndexManager is an extension of the default IndexManager, leveraging the Lucene NRT
(Near Real Time) features for extreme low latency index writes. As a tradeoff it requires a non-
clustered and non-shared index. In other words, it will ignore configuration settings for alternative
back ends other than lucene and will acquire exclusive write locks on the Directory.

To achieve this low latency writes, the IndexWriter will not flush every change to disk. Queries
will be allowed to read updated state from the unflushed index writer buffers; the downside of this
strategy is that if the application crashes or the IndexWriter is otherwise killed you'll have to
rebuild the indexes as some updates might be lost.

Because of these downsides, and because a master node in cluster can be configured for good
performance as well, the NRT configuration is only recommended for non clustered websites with
a limited amount of data.

3.2.3. Custom

It is also possible to configure a custom IndexManager implementation by specifying the fully

qualified class name of your custom implementation. This implementation must have a no-
argument constructor:

hibernate.search.[default|<indexname>].indexmanager = my.corp.myapp.CustomIndexManager

Tip

Your custom index manager implementation doesn't need to use the same
components as the default implementations. For example, you can delegate to a
remote indexing service which doesn't expose a Directory interface.

18
 Directory configuration

3.3. Directory configuration

As we have seen in Section 3.2, “Configuring the IndexManager” the default index manager uses
Lucene's notion of a Directory to store the index files. The Directory implementation can be
customized and Lucene comes bundled with a file system and an in-memory implementation.
DirectoryProvider is the Hibernate Search abstraction around a Lucene Directory and
handles the configuration and the initialization of the underlying Lucene resources. Table 3.1, “List
of built-in DirectoryProvider” shows the list of the directory providers available in Hibernate
Search together with their corresponding options.

To configure your DirectoryProvider you have to understand that each indexed entity is
associated to a Lucene index (except of the case where multiple entities share the same index
- Section 10.5, “Sharing indexes”). The name of the index is given by the index property of the
@Indexed annotation. If the index property is not specified the fully qualified name of the indexed
class will be used as name (recommended).

Knowing the index name, you can configure the directory provider and any additional
options by using the prefix hibernate.search.<indexname>. The name default
(hibernate.search.default) is reserved and can be used to define properties which
apply to all indexes. Example 3.2, “Configuring directory providers” shows how
hibernate.search.default.directory_provider is used to set the default directory provider
to be the filesystem one. hibernate.search.default.indexBase sets then the default base
directory for the indexes. As a result the index for the entity Status is created in /usr/lucene/
indexes/org.hibernate.example.Status.

The index for the Rule entity, however, is using an in-memory directory,
because the default directory provider for this entity is overridden by the property
hibernate.search.Rules.directory_provider.

Finally the Action entity uses a custom directory provider CustomDirectoryProvider specified
via hibernate.search.Actions.directory_provider.

Example 3.1. Specifying the index name

package org.hibernate.example;

@Indexed
public class Status { ... }

@Indexed(index="Rules")
public class Rule { ... }

@Indexed(index="Actions")
public class Action { ... }

19
Chapter 3. Configuration

Example 3.2. Configuring directory providers

hibernate.search.default.directory_provider = filesystem
hibernate.search.default.indexBase = /usr/lucene/indexes
hibernate.search.Rules.directory_provider = ram
hibernate.search.Actions.directory_provider = com.acme.hibernate.CustomDirectoryProvider

Tip

Using the described configuration scheme you can easily define common rules like
the directory provider and base directory, and override those defaults later on on
a per index basis.

Table 3.1. List of built-in DirectoryProvider

Name and description Properties

ram: Memory based directory, the directory will none
be uniquely identified (in the same deployment
unit) by the @Indexed.index element
filesystem: File system based directory. indexBase : base directory
The directory used will be <indexBase>/<
indexName: override @Indexed.index (useful
indexName >
for sharded indexes)

locking_strategy : optional, see

Section 3.7.2, “LockFactory configuration”

filesystem_access_type: allows to
determine the exact type of
FSDirectory implementation used by
this DirectoryProvider. Allowed values
are auto (the default value,
selects NIOFSDirectory on non
Windows systems, SimpleFSDirectory on
Windows), simple (SimpleFSDirectory), nio
(NIOFSDirectory), mmap (MMapDirectory).
Make sure to refer to Javadocs of these
Directory implementations before changing
this setting. Even though NIOFSDirectory
or MMapDirectory can bring substantial
performace boosts they also have their issues.
filesystem-master: File system based indexBase: base directory
directory. Like filesystem. It also copies the

20
 Directory configuration

Name and description Properties

index to a source directory (aka copy directory) indexName: override @Indexed.index (useful
on a regular basis. for sharded indexes)

The recommended value for the refresh period sourceBase: source (copy) base directory.
is (at least) 50% higher that the time to copy
the information (default 3600 seconds - 60 source: source directory suffix (default to
@Indexed.index). The actual source directory
minutes).
name being <sourceBase>/<source>
Note that the copy is based on an incremental
copy mechanism reducing the average copy refresh: refresh period in seconds (the copy
will take place every refresh seconds). If a
time.
copy is still in progress when the following
DirectoryProvider typically used on the master refresh period elapses, the second copy
node in a JMS back end cluster. operation will be skipped.

The buffer_size_on_copy optimum buffer_size_on_copy: The amount of

depends on your operating system and MegaBytes to move in a single low level copy
available RAM; most people reported good instruction; defaults to 16MB.
results using values between 16 and 64MB.
locking_strategy : optional, see
Section 3.7.2, “LockFactory configuration”

filesystem_access_type: allows to
determine the exact type of
FSDirectory implementation used by
this DirectoryProvider. Allowed values
are auto (the default value,
selects NIOFSDirectory on non
Windows systems, SimpleFSDirectory on
Windows), simple (SimpleFSDirectory), nio
(NIOFSDirectory), mmap (MMapDirectory).
Make sure to refer to Javadocs of these
Directory implementations before changing
this setting. Even though NIOFSDirectory
or MMapDirectory can bring substantial
performace boosts they also have their issues.
filesystem-slave: File system based directory. indexBase: Base directory
Like filesystem, but retrieves a master
version (source) on a regular basis. To avoid indexName: override @Indexed.index (useful
locking and inconsistent search results, 2 local for sharded indexes)
copies are kept. sourceBase: Source (copy) base directory.

The recommended value for the refresh period source: Source directory suffix (default to
is (at least) 50% higher that the time to copy @Indexed.index). The actual source directory

name being <sourceBase>/<source>

21
Chapter 3. Configuration

Name and description Properties

the information (default 3600 seconds - 60 refresh: refresh period in second (the copy
minutes). will take place every refresh seconds).

Note that the copy is based on an incremental buffer_size_on_copy: The amount of

copy mechanism reducing the average copy MegaBytes to move in a single low level copy
time. If a copy is still in progress when refresh instruction; defaults to 16MB.
period elapses, the second copy operation will
locking_strategy : optional, see
be skipped.
Section 3.7.2, “LockFactory configuration”
DirectoryProvider typically used on slave
retry_marker_lookup : optional, default to
nodes using a JMS back end.
0. Defines how many times we look for the
The buffer_size_on_copy optimum marker files in the source directory before
depends on your operating system and failing. Waiting 5 seconds between each try.
available RAM; most people reported good
retry_initialize_period : optional, set an
results using values between 16 and 64MB.
integer value in seconds to enable the retry
initialize feature: if the slave can't find the
master index it will try again until it's found in
background, without preventing the application
to start: fullText queries performed before the
index is initialized are not blocked but will return
empty results. When not enabling the option
or explicitly setting it to zero it will fail with an
exception instead of scheduling a retry timer.
To prevent the application from starting without
an invalid index but still control an initialization
timeout, see retry_marker_lookup instead.

filesystem_access_type: allows to
determine the exact type of
FSDirectory implementation used by
this DirectoryProvider. Allowed values
are auto (the default value,
selects NIOFSDirectory on non
Windows systems, SimpleFSDirectory on
Windows), simple (SimpleFSDirectory), nio
(NIOFSDirectory), mmap (MMapDirectory).
Make sure to refer to Javadocs of these
Directory implementations before changing
this setting. Even though NIOFSDirectory
or MMapDirectory can bring substantial
performace boosts they also have their issues.

22
 Infinispan Directory configuration

Name and description Properties

infinispan: Infinispan based directory. Use locking_cachename: name of the Infinispan
it to store the index in a distributed cache to use to store locks.
grid, making index changes visible to all
data_cachename : name of the Infinispan
elements of the cluster very quickly. Also
cache to use to store the largest data chunks;
see Section 3.3.1, “Infinispan Directory
this area will contain the largest objects, use
configuration” for additional requirements
replication if you have enough memory or
and configuration settings. Infinispan needs
switch to distribution.
a global configuration and additional
dependencies; the settings defined here apply metadata_cachename: name of the Infinispan
to each different index. cache to use to store the metadata relating
to the index; this data is rather small and
read very often, it's recommended to have this
cache setup using replication.

chunk_size: large files of the index are split

in smaller chunks, you might want to set
the highest value efficiently handled by your
network. Networking tuning might be useful.

Tip

If the built-in directory providers

do not fit your needs, you
can write your own directory
provider by implementing the
org.hibernate.store.DirectoryProvider interface. In this case, pass the
fully qualified class name of your provider into the directory_provider
property. You can pass any additional properties using the prefix
hibernate.search.<indexname>.

3.3.1. Infinispan Directory configuration

Infinispan is a distributed, scalable, highly available data grid platform which supports
autodiscovery of peer nodes. Using Infinispan and Hibernate Search in combination, it is possible
to store the Lucene index in a distributed environment where index updates are quickly available
on all nodes.

This section describes in greater detail how to configure Hibernate Search to use an Infinispan
Lucene Directory.

When using an Infinispan Directory the index is stored in memory and shared across multiple
nodes. It is considered a single directory distributed across all participating nodes. If a node
updates the index, all other nodes are updated as well. Updates on one node can be immediately
searched for in the whole cluster.

23
Chapter 3. Configuration

The default configuration replicates all data defining the index across all nodes, thus consuming
a significant amount of memory. For large indexes it's suggested to enable data distribution, so
that each piece of information is replicated to a subset of all cluster members.

It is also possible to offload part or most information to a CacheStore, such as plain filesystem,
Amazon S3, Cassandra, Berkley DB or standard relational databases. You can configure it to
have a CacheStore on each node or have a single centralized one shared by each node.

See the Infinispan documentation [http://infinispan.org/documentation/] for all Infinispan

configuration options.

3.3.1.1. Requirements

To use the Infinispan directory via Maven, add the following dependencies:

Example 3.3. Maven dependencies for Hibernate Search

<dependency>
<groupId>org.hibernate</groupId>
<artifactId>hibernate-search</artifactId>
<version>4.5.3.Final</version>
</dependency>
<dependency>
<groupId>org.hibernate</groupId>
<artifactId>hibernate-search-infinispan</artifactId>
<version>4.5.3.Final</version>
</dependency>

For the non-maven users, add hibernate-search-infinispan.jar, infinispan-lucene-

directory.jar and infinispan-core.jar to your application classpath. These last two jars are
distributed by Infinispan [http://infinispan.org/download/].

3.3.1.2. Architecture

Even when using an Infinispan directory it's still recommended to use the JMS Master/Slave or
JGroups backend, because in Infinispan all nodes will share the same index and it is likely that
IndexWriters being active on different nodes will try to acquire the lock on the same index. So
instead of sending updates directly to the index, send it to a JMS queue or JGroups channel and
have a single node apply all changes on behalf of all other nodes.

Configuring a non-default backend is not a requirement but a performance optimization as locks

are enabled to have a single node writing.

To configure a JMS slave only the backend must be replaced, the directory provider must be set
to infinispan; set the same directory provider on the master, they will connect without the need
to setup the copy job across nodes. Using the JGroups backend is very similar - just combine the
backend configuration with the infinispan directory provider.

24
 Worker configuration

3.3.1.3. Infinispan Configuration

The most simple configuration only requires to enable the backend:

hibernate.search.[default|<indexname>].directory_provider = infinispan

That's all what is needed to get a cluster-replicated index, but the default configuration does not
enable any form of permanent persistence for the index; to enable such a feature an Infinispan
configuration file should be provided.

To use Infinispan, Hibernate Search requires a CacheManager; it can lookup and reuse an existing
CacheManager, via JNDI, or start and manage a new one. In the latter case Hibernate Search will
start and stop it ( closing occurs when the Hibernate SessionFactory is closed).

To use and existing CacheManager via JNDI (optional parameter):

hibernate.search.infinispan.cachemanager_jndiname = [jndiname]

To start a new CacheManager from a configuration file (optional parameter):

hibernate.search.infinispan.configuration_resourcename = [infinispan configuration filename]

If both parameters are defined, JNDI will have priority. If none of these is defined, Hibernate Search
will use the default Infinispan configuration included in hibernate-search-infinispan.jar. This
configuration should work fine in most cases but does not store the index in a persistent cache
store.

As mentioned in Table 3.1, “List of built-in DirectoryProvider”, each index makes use of
three caches, so three different caches should be configured as shown in the default-
hibernatesearch-infinispan.xml provided in the hibernate-search-infinispan.jar.
Several indexes can share the same caches.

3.4. Worker configuration

It is possible to refine how Hibernate Search interacts with Lucene through the worker
configuration. There exist several architectural components and possible extension points. Let's
have a closer look.

First there is a Worker. An implementation of the Worker interface is responsible for receiving
all entity changes, queuing them by context and applying them once a context ends. The most
intuitive context, especially in connection with ORM, is the transaction. For this reason Hibernate
Search will per default use the TransactionalWorker to scope all changes per transaction. One
can, however, imagine a scenario where the context depends for example on the number of entity

25
Chapter 3. Configuration

changes or some other application (lifecycle) events. For this reason the Worker implementation
is configurable as shown in Table 3.2, “Scope configuration”.

Table 3.2. Scope configuration

Property Description
hibernate.search.worker.scope The fully qualified class name of the Worker
implementation to use. If this property is
not set, empty or transaction the default
TransactionalWorker is used.

hibernate.search.worker.* All configuration properties prefixed with

hibernate.search.worker are passed to the
Worker during initialization. This allows adding
custom, worker specific parameters.

Once a context ends it is time to prepare and apply the index changes. This can be done
synchronously or asynchronously from within a new thread. Synchronous updates have the
advantage that the index is at all times in sync with the databases. Asynchronous updates, on the
other hand, can help to minimize the user response time. The drawback is potential discrepancies
between database and index states. Lets look at the configuration options shown in Table 3.3,
“Execution configuration”.

Note

The following options can be different on each index; in fact they need the
indexName prefix or use default to set the default value for all indexes.

Table 3.3. Execution configuration

Property Description
hibernate.search.<indexName>. sync: synchronous execution (default)
worker.execution
async: asynchronous execution

hibernate.search.<indexName>. The backend can apply updates from the same

worker.thread_pool.size transaction context (or batch) in parallel, using
a threadpool. The default value is 1. You can
experiment with larger values if you have many
operations per transaction.
hibernate.search.<indexName>. Defines the maximal number of work queue
worker.buffer_queue.max if the thread poll is starved. Useful only for
asynchronous execution. Default to infinite. If
the limit is reached, the work is done by the
main thread.

26
 Worker configuration

So far all work is done within the same Virtual Machine (VM), no matter which execution mode.
The total amount of work has not changed for the single VM. Luckily there is a better approach,
namely delegation. It is possible to send the indexing work to a different server by configuring
hibernate.search.default.worker.backend - see Table 3.4, “Backend configuration”. Again this
option can be configured differently for each index.

Table 3.4. Backend configuration

Property Description
hibernate.search.<indexName>. lucene: The default backend which runs index
worker.backend updates in the same VM. Also used when the
property is undefined or empty.

jms: JMS backend. Index updates are

send to a JMS queue to be processed
by an indexing master. See Table 3.5,
“JMS backend configuration” for additional
configuration options and Section 3.4.1, “JMS
Master/Slave back end” for a more detailed
description of this setup.

jgroupsMaster, jgroupsSlave or jgroups:

Backend using JGroups [http://
www.jgroups.org/] as communication layer.
See Section 3.4.2, “JGroups Master/Slave
back end” for a more detailed description of this
setup.

blackhole: Mainly a test/developer setting

which ignores all indexing work

You can also specify the fully

qualified name of a class implementing
BackendQueueProcessor. This way you can
implement your own communication layer. The
implementation is responsible for returning a
Runnable instance which on execution will
process the index work.

Table 3.5. JMS backend configuration

Property Description
hibernate.search.<indexName>.worker.jndi.* Defines the JNDI properties to initiate the
InitialContext (if needed). JNDI is only used by
the JMS back end.

27
Chapter 3. Configuration

hibernate.search.<indexName>. Mandatory for the JMS back end. Defines

worker.jms.connection_factory the JNDI name to lookup the JMS connection
factory from (/ConnectionFactory by default
in JBoss AS)
hibernate.search.<indexName>. Mandatory for the JMS back end. Defines the
worker.jms.queue JNDI name to lookup the JMS queue from. The
queue will be used to post work messages.
hibernate.search.<indexName>. Optional for the JMS slaves. Use it when your
worker.jms.login queue requires login credentials to define your
login.
hibernate.search.<indexName>. Optional for the JMS slaves. Use it when your
worker.jms.login queue requires login credentials to define your
password.

Warning

As you probably noticed, some of the shown properties are correlated which means
that not all combinations of property values make sense. In fact you can end up with
a non-functional configuration. This is especially true for the case that you provide
your own implementations of some of the shown interfaces. Make sure to study
the existing code before you write your own Worker or BackendQueueProcessor
implementation.

3.4.1. JMS Master/Slave back end

This section describes in greater detail how to configure the Master/Slave Hibernate Search
architecture.

28
 JMS Master/Slave back end

JMS back end configuration.

3.4.1.1. Slave nodes

Every index update operation is sent to a JMS queue. Index querying operations are executed
on a local index copy.

Example 3.4. JMS Slave configuration

### slave configuration

## DirectoryProvider
# (remote) master location
hibernate.search.default.sourceBase = /mnt/mastervolume/lucenedirs/mastercopy

# local copy location

hibernate.search.default.indexBase = /Users/prod/lucenedirs

# refresh every half hour

hibernate.search.default.refresh = 1800

# appropriate directory provider

hibernate.search.default.directory_provider = filesystem-slave

## Backend configuration

29
Chapter 3. Configuration

hibernate.search.default.worker.backend = jms
hibernate.search.default.worker.jms.connection_factory = /ConnectionFactory
hibernate.search.default.worker.jms.queue = queue/hibernatesearch
#optionally authentication credentials:
hibernate.search.default.worker.jms.login = myname
hibernate.search.default.worker.jms.password = wonttellyou
#optional jndi configuration (check your JMS provider for more information)

## Optional asynchronous execution strategy

# hibernate.search.default.worker.execution = async
# hibernate.search.default.worker.thread_pool.size = 2
# hibernate.search.default.worker.buffer_queue.max = 50

Tip

A file system local copy is recommended for faster search results.

3.4.1.2. Master node

Every index update operation is taken from a JMS queue and executed. The master index is
copied on a regular basis.

Example 3.5. JMS Master configuration

### master configuration

## DirectoryProvider
# (remote) master location where information is copied to
hibernate.search.default.sourceBase = /mnt/mastervolume/lucenedirs/mastercopy

# local master location

hibernate.search.default.indexBase = /Users/prod/lucenedirs

# refresh every half hour

hibernate.search.default.refresh = 1800

# appropriate directory provider

hibernate.search.default.directory_provider = filesystem-master

## Backend configuration
#Backend is the default lucene one

Tip

It is recommended that the refresh period be higher than the expected copy time; if
a copy operation is still being performed when the next refresh triggers, the second

30
 JGroups Master/Slave back end

refresh is skipped: it's safe to set this value low even when the copy time is not
known.

In addition to the Hibernate Search framework configuration, a Message Driven Bean has to be
written and set up to process the index works queue through JMS.

Example 3.6. Message Driven Bean processing the indexing queue

@MessageDriven(activationConfig = {
@ActivationConfigProperty(propertyName="destinationType",
propertyValue="javax.jms.Queue"),
@ActivationConfigProperty(propertyName="destination",
propertyValue="queue/hibernatesearch"),
@ActivationConfigProperty(propertyName="DLQMaxResent", propertyValue="1")
} )
public class MDBSearchController extends AbstractJMSHibernateSearchController
implements MessageListener {
@PersistenceContext EntityManager em;

//method retrieving the appropriate session

protected Session getSession() {
return (Session) em.getDelegate();
}

//potentially close the session opened in #getSession(), not needed here

protected void cleanSessionIfNeeded(Session session)
}
}

This example inherits from the abstract JMS controller class available in the Hibernate
Search source code and implements a JavaEE MDB. This implementation is given as
an example and can be adjusted to make use of non Java EE Message Driven Beans.
For more information about the getSession() and cleanSessionIfNeeded(), please check
AbstractJMSHibernateSearchController's javadoc.

3.4.2. JGroups Master/Slave back end

This section describes how to configure the JGroups Master/Slave back end. The master and
slave roles are similar to what is illustrated in Section 3.4.1, “JMS Master/Slave back end”, only a
different backend (hibernate.search.default.worker.backend) needs to be set.

A specific backend can be configured to act either as a slave using jgroupsSlave, as a master
using jgroupsMaster, or can automatically switch between the roles as needed by using jgroups.

Note
Either you specify a single jgroupsMaster and a set of jgroupsSlave instances,
or you specify all instances as jgroups. Never mix the two approaches!

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Chapter 3. Configuration

All backends configured to use JGroups share the same channel. The JGroups JChannel is
the main communication link across all nodes participating in the same cluster group; since it
is convenient to have just one channel shared across all backends, the Channel configuration
properties are not defined on a per-worker section but are defined globally. See Section 3.4.2.4,
“JGroups channel configuration”.

Table Table 3.6, “JGroups backend configuration properties” contains all configuration options
which can be set independently on each index backend. These apply to all three variants of the
backend: jgroupsSlave, jgroupsMaster, jgroups. It is very unlikely that you need to change
any of these from their defaults.

Table 3.6. JGroups backend configuration properties

Property Description
hibernate.search.<indexName>.jgroups.block_waiting_ack
Set to either true or false. False is more
efficient but will not wait for the operation to be
delivered to the peers. Defaults to true when
the backend is synchronous, to false when
the backend is async.
hibernate.search.<indexName>.jgroups. The timeout of waiting for a single
messages_timeout command to be acknowledged and executed
when block_waiting_ack is true, or
just acknowledged otherwise. Value in
milliseconds, defaults to 20000.
hibernate.search.<indexName>.jgroups.delegate_backend
The master node receiving indexing operations
forwards them to a standard backend to
be performed. Defaults to lucene. See also
Table 3.4, “Backend configuration” for other
options, but probably the only useful option
is blackhole, or a custom implementation, to
help isolating network latency problems.

3.4.2.1. Slave nodes

Every index update operation is sent through a JGroups channel to the master node. Index
querying operations are executed on a local index copy. Enabling the JGroups worker only makes
sure the index operations are sent to the master, you still have to synchronize configuring an
appropriate directory (See filesystem-master, filesystem-slave or infinispan options in
Section 3.3, “Directory configuration”).

Example 3.7. JGroups Slave configuration

### slave configuration

hibernate.search.default.worker.backend = jgroupsSlave

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 JGroups Master/Slave back end

3.4.2.2. Master node

Every index update operation is taken from a JGroups channel and executed. The master index
is copied on a regular basis.

Example 3.8. JGroups Master configuration

### master configuration

hibernate.search.default.worker.backend = jgroupsMaster

3.4.2.3. Automatic master election

Important

This feature is considered experimental. In particular during a re-election process

there is a small window of time in which indexing requests could be lost.

In this mode the different nodes will autonomously elect a master node. When a master fails, a
new node is elected automatically.

When setting this backend it is expected that all Hibernate Search instances in the same cluster
use the same backend for each specific index: this configuration is an alternative to the static
jgroupsMaster and jgroupsSlave approach so make sure to not mix them.

To synchronize the indexes in this configuration avoid filesystem-master and filesystem-

slave directory providers as their behaviour can not be switched dynamically; use the Infinispan
Directory instead, which has no need for different configurations on each instance and allows
dynamic switching of writers; see also Section 3.3.1, “Infinispan Directory configuration”.

Example 3.9. JGroups configuration for automatic master configuration

### automatic configuration

hibernate.search.default.worker.backend = jgroups

Tip

Should you use jgroups or the couple jgroupsMaster, jgroupsSlave?

The dynamic jgroups backend is better suited for environments in which your
master is more likely to need to failover to a different machine, as in clouds. The
static configuration has the benefit of keeping the master at a well known location:
your architecture might take advantage of it by sending most write requests to the

33
Chapter 3. Configuration

known master. Also optimisation and MassIndexer operations need to be triggered

on the master node.

3.4.2.4. JGroups channel configuration

Configuring the JGroups channel essentially entails specifying the transport in terms of a
network protocol stack. To configure the JGroups transport, point the configuration property
hibernate.search.services.jgroups.configurationFile to a JGroups configuration file;
this can be either a file path or a Java resource name.

Tip

If no property is explicitly specified it is assumed that the JGroups default

configuration file flush-udp.xml is used. This example configuration is known to
work in most scenarios, with the notable exception of Amazon AWS; refer to the
JGroups manual [http://www.jgroups.org/manual-3.x/html/] for more examples and
protocol configuration details.

The default cluster name is Hibernate Search Cluster which can be configured as seen in
Example 3.10, “JGroups cluster name configuration”.

Example 3.10. JGroups cluster name configuration

hibernate.search.services.jgroups.clusterName = My-Custom-Cluster-Id

The cluster name is what identifies a group: by changing the name you can run different clusters
in the same network in isolation.

3.4.2.4.1. JGroups channel instance injection

For programmatic configurations, one additional option is available to configure the JGroups
channel: to pass an existing channel instance to Hibernate Search directly using the property
hibernate.search.services.jgroups.providedChannel, as shown in the following example.

import org.hibernate.search.backend.impl.jgroups.JGroupsChannelProvider;

org.jgroups.JChannel channel = ...

Map<String,String> properties = new HashMap<String,String)(1);
properties.put( JGroupsChannelProvider.CHANNEL_INJECT, channel );
EntityManagerFactory emf = Persistence.createEntityManagerFactory( "userPU", properties );

34
 Reader strategy configuration

3.5. Reader strategy configuration

The different reader strategies are described in Reader strategy. Out of the box strategies are:

• shared: share index readers across several queries. This strategy is the most efficient.

• not-shared: create an index reader for each individual query

The default reader strategy is shared. This can be adjusted:

hibernate.search.[default|<indexname>].reader.strategy = not-shared

Adding this property switches to the not-shared strategy.

Or if you have a custom reader strategy:

hibernate.search.[default|<indexname>].reader.strategy = my.corp.myapp.CustomReaderProvider

where my.corp.myapp.CustomReaderProvider is the custom strategy implementation.

3.6. Exception handling

Hibernate Search allows you to configure how exceptions are handled during the indexing
process. If no configuration is provided then exceptions are logged to the log output by default. It
is possible to explicitly declare the exception logging mechanism as seen below:

hibernate.search.error_handler = log

The default exception handling occurs for both synchronous and asynchronous indexing.
Hibernate Search provides an easy mechanism to override the default error handling
implementation.

In order to provide your own implementation you must implement the ErrorHandler interface,
which provides the handle(ErrorContext context) method. ErrorContext provides a
reference to the primary LuceneWork instance, the underlying exception and any subsequent
LuceneWork instances that could not be processed due to the primary exception.

public interface ErrorContext {

List<LuceneWork> getFailingOperations();
LuceneWork getOperationAtFault();
Throwable getThrowable();
boolean hasErrors();
}

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Chapter 3. Configuration

To register this error handler with Hibernate Search you must declare the fully qualified classname
of your ErrorHandler implementation in the configuration properties:

hibernate.search.error_handler = CustomerErrorHandler

3.7. Lucene configuration

Even though Hibernate Search will try to shield you as much as possible from Lucene specifics,
there are several Lucene specifics which can be directly configured, either for performance
reasons or for satisfying a specific usecase. The following sections discuss these configuration
options.

3.7.1. Tuning indexing performance

Hibernate Search allows you to tune the Lucene indexing performance by specifying a set of
parameters which are passed through to underlying Lucene IndexWriter such as mergeFactor,
maxMergeDocs and maxBufferedDocs. You can specify these parameters either as default values
applying for all indexes, on a per index basis, or even per shard.

There are several low level IndexWriter settings which can be tuned for different use cases.
These parameters are grouped by the indexwriter keyword:

hibernate.search.[default|<indexname>].indexwriter.<parameter_name>

If no value is set for an indexwriter value in a specific shard configuration, Hibernate Search
will look at the index section, then at the default section.

Example 3.11. Example performance option configuration

hibernate.search.Animals.2.indexwriter.max_merge_docs = 10
hibernate.search.Animals.2.indexwriter.merge_factor = 20
hibernate.search.Animals.2.indexwriter.term_index_interval = default
hibernate.search.default.indexwriter.max_merge_docs = 100
hibernate.search.default.indexwriter.ram_buffer_size = 64

The configuration in Example 3.11, “Example performance option configuration” will result in these
settings applied on the second shard of the Animal index:

• max_merge_docs = 10

• merge_factor = 20

• ram_buffer_size = 64MB

• term_index_interval = Lucene default

36
 Tuning indexing performance

All other values will use the defaults defined in Lucene.

The default for all values is to leave them at Lucene's own default. The values listed in Table 3.7,
“List of indexing performance and behavior properties” depend for this reason on the version of
Lucene you are using. The values shown are relative to version 2.4. For more information about
Lucene indexing performance, please refer to the Lucene documentation.

Table 3.7. List of indexing performance and behavior properties

Property Description Default Value

hibernate.search. Set to true when no other true (improved performance,
[default|<indexname>]. process will need to write releases locks only at
exclusive_index_use to the same index. This shutdown)
will enable Hibernate Search
to work in exclusive mode
on the index and improve
performance when writing
changes to the index.
hibernate.search. Each index has a separate 1000
[default|<indexname>]. "pipeline" which contains
max_queue_length the updates to be applied
to the index. When this
queue is full adding more
operations to the queue
becomes a blocking operation.
Configuring this setting
doesn't make much sense
unless the worker.execution
is configured as async.
hibernate.search. Determines the minimal Disabled (flushes by RAM
[default|<indexname>]. number of delete terms usage)
indexwriter.max_buffered_delete_terms
required before the buffered
in-memory delete terms are
applied and flushed. If there
are documents buffered in
memory at the time, they are
merged and a new segment is
created.
hibernate.search.[default| The interval in milliseconds 1000
<indexname>].index_flush_interval
between flushes of
write operations to the
index storage. Ignored
unless worker.execution is
configured as async.

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Chapter 3. Configuration

Property Description Default Value

hibernate.search. Controls the amount of Disabled (flushes by RAM
[default|<indexname>]. documents buffered in usage)
indexwriter.max_buffered_docs memory during indexing. The
bigger the more RAM is
consumed.
hibernate.search. Defines the largest number Unlimited
[default|<indexname>]. of documents allowed in (Integer.MAX_VALUE)
indexwriter.max_merge_docs a segment. Smaller values
perform better on frequently
changing indexes, larger
values provide better search
performance if the index does
not change often.
hibernate.search. Controls segment merge 10
[default|<indexname>]. frequency and size.
indexwriter.merge_factor
Determines how often
segment indexes are merged
when insertion occurs. With
smaller values, less RAM
is used while indexing,
and searches on unoptimized
indexes are faster, but
indexing speed is slower.
With larger values, more
RAM is used during indexing,
and while searches on
unoptimized indexes are
slower, indexing is faster. Thus
larger values (> 10) are best
for batch index creation, and
smaller values (< 10) for
indexes that are interactively
maintained. The value must
not be lower than 2.
hibernate.search. Controls segment merge 0 MB (actually ~1K)
[default|<indexname>]. frequency and size.
indexwriter.merge_min_size
Segments smaller than this
size (in MB) are always
considered for the next
segment merge operation.

38
 Tuning indexing performance

Property Description Default Value

Setting this too large might
result in expensive merge
operations, even tough they
are less frequent.

See also
org.apache.lucene.index.LogDocMergePolicy.
minMergeSize.

hibernate.search. Controls segment merge Unlimited

[default|<indexname>]. frequency and size.
indexwriter.merge_max_size
Segments larger than this size
(in MB) are never merged in
bigger segments.

This helps reduce memory

requirements and avoids
some merging operations at
the cost of optimal search
speed. When optimizing an
index this value is ignored.

See also
org.apache.lucene.index.LogDocMergePolicy.
maxMergeSize.

hibernate.search. Controls segment merge Unlimited

[default|<indexname>]. frequency and size.
indexwriter.merge_max_optimize_size
Segments larger than this size
(in MB) are not merged in
bigger segments even when
optimizing the index (see
merge_max_size setting as
well).

Applied to
org.apache.lucene.index.LogDocMergePolicy.
maxMergeSizeForOptimize.

hibernate.search. Controls segment merge true

[default|<indexname>]. frequency and size.
indexwriter.merge_calibrate_by_deletes
Set to false to not consider
deleted documents when
estimating the merge policy.

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Chapter 3. Configuration

Property Description Default Value

Applied to
org.apache.lucene.index.LogMergePolicy.
calibrateSizeByDeletes.

hibernate.search. Controls the amount of RAM 16 MB

[default|<indexname>]. in MB dedicated to document
indexwriter.ram_buffer_size buffers. When used together
max_buffered_docs a flush
occurs for whichever event
happens first.

Generally for faster indexing

performance it's best to flush
by RAM usage instead of
document count and use as
large a RAM buffer as you can.
hibernate.search. Expert: Set the interval 128
[default|<indexname>]. between indexed terms.
indexwriter.term_index_interval
Large values cause less
memory to be used
by IndexReader, but slow
random-access to terms.
Small values cause more
memory to be used by
an IndexReader, and speed
random-access to terms. See
Lucene documentation for
more details.
hibernate.search. The advantage of using the true
[default|<indexname>]. compound file format is that
indexwriter.use_compound_file less file descriptors are used.
The disadvantage is that
indexing takes more time and
temporary disk space. You can
set this parameter to false
in an attempt to improve the
indexing time, but you could
run out of file descriptors if
mergeFactor is also large.

Boolean parameter, use

"true" or "false". The default
value for this option is true.

40
 Tuning indexing performance

Property Description Default Value

hibernate.search. Not all entity changes require true
enable_dirty_check an update of the Lucene index.
If all of the updated entity
properties (dirty properties)
are not indexed Hibernate
Search will skip the re-
indexing work.

Disable this option if you use

custom FieldBridges which
need to be invoked at each
update event (even though the
property for which the field
bridge is configured has not
changed).

This optimization will not

be applied on classes
using a @ClassBridge or a
@DynamicBoost.

Boolean parameter, use

"true" or "false". The default
value for this option is true.

Tip

When your architecture permits it, always keep

hibernate.search.default.exclusive_index_use=true as it greatly improves
efficiency in index writing. This is the default since Hibernate Search version 4.

Tip

To tune the indexing speed it might be useful to time the object loading from
database in isolation from the writes to the index. To achieve this set the blackhole
as worker backend and start your indexing routines. This backend does not disable
Hibernate Search: it will still generate the needed changesets to the index, but
will discard them instead of flushing them to the index. In contrast to setting
the hibernate.search.indexing_strategy to manual, using blackhole will
possibly load more data from the database. because associated entities are re-
indexed as well.

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Chapter 3. Configuration

hibernate.search.[default|<indexname>].worker.backend blackhole

The recommended approach is to focus first on optimizing the object loading, and
then use the timings you achieve as a baseline to tune the indexing process.

Warning
The blackhole backend is not meant to be used in production, only as a tool to
identify indexing bottlenecks.

3.7.1.1. Control segment size

The options merge_max_size, merge_max_optimize_size, merge_calibrate_by_deletes give
you control on the maximum size of the segments being created, but you need to understand
how they affect file sizes. If you need to hard limit the size, consider that merging a segment is
about adding it together with another existing segment to form a larger one, so you might want to
set the max_size for merge operations to less than half of your hard limit. Also segments might
initially be generated larger than your expected size at first creation time: before they are ever
merged. A segment is never created much larger than ram_buffer_size, but the threshold is
checked as an estimate.

Example:

//to be fairly confident no files grow above 15MB, use:

hibernate.search.default.indexwriter.ram_buffer_size = 10
hibernate.search.default.indexwriter.merge_max_optimize_size = 7
hibernate.search.default.indexwriter.merge_max_size = 7

Tip
When using the Infinispan Directory to cluster indexes make sure that your
segments are smaller than the chunk_size so that you avoid fragmenting
segments in the grid. Note that the chunk_size of the Infinispan Directory is
expressed in bytes, while the index tuning options are in MB.

3.7.2. LockFactory configuration

Lucene Directorys have default locking strategies which work generally good enough for most
cases, but it's possible to specify for each index managed by Hibernate Search a specific
LockingFactory you want to use. This is generally not needed but could be useful.

42
 LockFactory configuration

Some of these locking strategies require a filesystem level lock and may be used even on RAM
based indexes, this combination is valid but in this case the indexBase configuration option usually
needed only for filesystem based Directory instances must be specified to point to a filesystem
location where to store the lock marker files.

To select a locking factory, set the hibernate.search.<index>.locking_strategy option to

one of simple, native, single or none. Alternatively set it to the fully qualified name of an
implementation of org.hibernate.search.store.LockFactoryProvider.

Table 3.8. List of available LockFactory implementations

name Class Description

simple org.apache.lucene.store. Safe implementation based on
SimpleFSLockFactory Java's File API, it marks the
usage of the index by creating
a marker file.

If for some reason you had to

kill your application, you will
need to remove this file before
restarting it.
native org.apache.lucene.store. As does simple this also
NativeFSLockFactory marks the usage of the index
by creating a marker file, but
this one is using native OS file
locks so that even if the JVM
is terminated the locks will be
cleaned up.

This implementation has

known problems on NFS,
avoid it on network shares.

native is the default

implementation for the
filesystem, filesystem-
master and filesystem-
slave directory providers.

single org.apache.lucene.store. This LockFactory doesn't use

SingleInstanceLockFactory a file marker but is a Java
object lock held in memory;
therefore it's possible to use
it only when you are sure the
index is not going to be shared
by any other process.

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Chapter 3. Configuration

name Class Description

This is the default
implementation for the ram
directory provider.
none org.apache.lucene.store. All changes to this index are
NoLockFactory not coordinated by any lock;
test your application carefully
and make sure you know what
it means.

Configuration example:

hibernate.search.default.locking_strategy = simple
hibernate.search.Animals.locking_strategy = native
hibernate.search.Books.locking_strategy = org.custom.components.MyLockingFactory

The Infinispan Directory uses a custom implementation; it's still possible to override it but make
sure you understand how that will work, especially with clustered indexes.

3.7.3. Index format compatibility

While Hibernate Search strives to offer a backwards compatible API making it easy to port your
application to newer versions, it still delegates to Apache Lucene to handle the index writing and
searching. This creates a dependency to the Lucene index format. The Lucene developers of
course attempt to keep a stable index format, but sometimes a change in the format can not be
avoided. In those cases you either have to reindex all your data or use an index upgrade tool.
Sometimes Lucene is also able to read the old format so you don't need to take specific actions
(besides making backup of your index).

While an index format incompatibility is a rare event, it can happen more often that Lucene's
Analyzer implementations might slightly change its behaviour. This can lead to a poor recall
score, possibly missing many hits from the results.

Hibernate Search exposes a configuration property hibernate.search.lucene_version which

instructs the analyzers and other Lucene classes to conform to their behaviour as defined in an
(older) specific version of Lucene. See also org.apache.lucene.util.Version contained in the
lucene-core.jar. Depending on the specific version of Lucene you're using you might have
different options available. When this option is not specified, Hibernate Search will instruct Lucene
to use the default version, which is usually the best option for new projects. Still it's recommended
to define the version you're using explicitly in the configuration so that when you happen to upgrade
Lucene the analyzers will not change behaviour. You can then choose to update this value at a
later time, when you for example have the chance to rebuild the index from scratch.

44
 Metadata API

Example 3.12. Force Analyzers to be compatible with a Lucene 3.0 created

index

hibernate.search.lucene_version = LUCENE_30

This option is global for the configured SearchFactory and affects all Lucene APIs having such
a parameter, as this should be applied consistently. So if you are also making use of Lucene
bypassing Hibernate Search, make sure to apply the same value too.

3.8. Metadata API

After looking at all these different configuration options, it is time to have a look at an API which
allows you to prorgammatically access parts of the configuration. Via the metadata API you can
determine the indexed types and also how they are mapped (see Chapter 4, Mapping entities to
the index structure) to the index structure. The entry point into this API is the SearchFactory.
It offers two methods, namely getIndexedTypes() and getIndexedTypeDescriptor(Class<?
>). The former returns a set of all indexed type, where as the latter allows to retrieve a so called
IndexedTypeDescriptorfor a gven type. This descriptor allows you determine whether the type
is indexed at all and, if so, whether the index is for example sharded or not (see Section 10.4,
“Sharding indexes”). It also allows you to determine the static boost of the type (see Section 4.2.1,
“Static index time boosting”) as well as its dynamic boost strategy (see Section 4.2.2, “Dynamic
index time boosting”). Most importantly, however, you get information about the indexed properties
and generated Lucene Document fields. This is exposed via PropertyDescriptors respectively
FieldDescriptors. The easiest way to get to know the API is to explore it via the IDE or its
javadocs.

Note
All descriptor instances of the metadata API are read only. They do not allow to
change any runtime configuration.

3.9. Hibernate Search as a WildFly module

If you are deploying your application on WildFly 8, Hibernate Search is included in the application
server. A benefit is that rather than including Hibernate Search jars as a dependency in your
application, you can activate the module included in the server.

We provide modules for Hibernate Search, for Apache Lucene and for some useful Solr libraries.
The Hibernate Search modules are:

• org.hibernate.search.orm:main, for users of Hibernate Search with Hibernate. This will

transitively include Hibernate ORM, Apache Lucene and Solr in your classpath, so this is all
you need.

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Chapter 3. Configuration

• org.hibernate.search.engine:main, for projects integrating with the internal indexing engine but
not using Hibernate ORM (experts only, not covered in this guide).

There are two alternative ways to get the application server to make Hibernate Search ORM
module available to your deployment:

Using the manifest

Add this entry to the MANIFEST.MF in your archive:

Dependencies: org.hibernate.search.orm services

Using jboss-deployment-structure.xml
This is a proprietary JBoss AS descriptor, add a WEB-INF/jboss-deployment-structure.xml in
your archive with content:

<jboss-deployment-structure>
<deployment>
<dependencies>
<module name="org.hibernate.search.orm" services="export" />
</dependencies>
</deployment>
</jboss-deployment-structure>

More details about modules are described in Class Loading in WildFly 8 [https://docs.jboss.org/
author/display/WFLY8/Class+Loading+in+AS7].

Tip

Modular classloading is a feature of JBoss EAP as well, but if you are using JBoss
EAP, you're reading the wrong version of the user guide! JBoss EAP subscriptions
include official support for Hibernate Search (as part of the WFK) and come with a
different edition of this guide specifically tailored for EAP users.

46
Chapter 4.

Mapping entities to the index

structure
4.1. Mapping an entity
In Chapter 1, Getting started you have already learned that all the metadata information needed
to index entities is described through annotations. There is no need for xml mapping files. You can
still use Hibernate mapping files for the basic Hibernate configuration, but the Hibernate Search
specific configuration has to be expressed via annotations.

Note

There is no XML configuration available for Hibernate Search but we provide

a powerful programmatic mapping API that elegantly replaces this kind of
deployment form (see Section 4.7, “Programmatic API” for more information).

If you want to contribute the XML mapping implementation, see HSEARCH-210

[https://hibernate.onjira.com/browse/HSEARCH-210].

4.1.1. Basic mapping

Lets start with the most commonly used annotations when mapping an entity.

4.1.1.1. @Indexed

Foremost you must declare a persistent class as indexable by annotating the class with @Indexed.
All entities not annotated with @Indexed will be ignored by the indexing process.

Example 4.1. Making a class indexable with @Indexed

@Entity
@Indexed
public class Essay {
...
}

You can optionally specify the Indexed.index attribute to change the default name of the index.
For more information regarding index naming see Section 3.3, “Directory configuration”.

You can also specify an optional indexing interceptor. For more information see Section 4.5,
“Conditional indexing: to index or not based on entity state”.

47
Chapter 4. Mapping entities t...

4.1.1.2. @Field
For each property (or attribute) of your entity, you have the ability to describe how it will be indexed.
The default (no annotation present) means that the property is ignored by the indexing process.
@Field does declare a property as indexed and allows you to configure several aspects of the
indexing process by setting one or more of the following attributes:

• name: describe under which name the property should be stored in the Lucene Document. The
default value is the property name (following the JavaBeans convention)

• store: describe whether or not the property is stored in the Lucene index. You can store
the value Store.YES (consuming more space in the index but allowing projection, see
Section 5.1.3.5, “Projection”), store it in a compressed way Store.COMPRESS (this does
consume more CPU), or avoid any storage Store.NO (this is the default value). When a property
is stored, you can retrieve its original value from the Lucene Document. Storing the property
has no impact though on whether the value is searchable or not.

• index: describe whether the property is indexed or not. The different values are Index.NO
(no indexing, i.e. cannot be found by a query), Index.YES (the element gets indexed and is
searchable). The default value is Index.YES. Index.NO can be useful for cases where a property
is not required to be searchable, but should be available for projection.

Tip
Index.NO in combination with Analyze.YES or Norms.YES is not useful, since
analyze and norms require the property to be indexed

• analyze: determines whether the property is analyzed (Analyze.YES) or not (Analyze.NO). The
default value is Analyze.YES.

Tip
Whether or not you want to analyze a property depends on whether you wish to
search the element as is, or by the words it contains. It make sense to analyze
a text field, but probably not a date field.

Tip
Fields used for sorting or faceting must not be analyzed.

• norms: describes whether index time boosting information should be stored (Norms.YES) or not
(Norms.NO). Not storing the norms can save a considerable amount of memory, but index time
boosting will not be available in this case. The default value is Norms.YES.

48
 Basic mapping

• termVector: describes collections of term-frequency pairs. This attribute enables the storing of
the term vectors within the documents during indexing. The default value is TermVector.NO.

The different values of this attribute are:

Value Definition
TermVector.YES Store the term vectors of each document.
This produces two synchronized arrays,
one contains document terms and the other
contains the term's frequency.
TermVector.NO Do not store term vectors.
TermVector.WITH_OFFSETS Store the term vector and token offset
information. This is the same as
TermVector.YES plus it contains the starting
and ending offset position information for the
terms.
TermVector.WITH_POSITIONS Store the term vector and token position
information. This is the same as
TermVector.YES plus it contains the ordinal
positions of each occurrence of a term in a
document.
TermVector.WITH_POSITION_OFFSETS Store the term vector, token position and
offset information. This is a combination
of the YES, WITH_OFFSETS and
WITH_POSITIONS.

• indexNullAs: Per default null values are ignored and not indexed. However, using
indexNullAs you can specify a string which will be inserted as token for the null value. Per
default this value is set to org.hibernate.search.annotations.Field.DO_NOT_INDEX_NULL
indicating that null values should not be indexed. You can set this value to
DEFAULT_NULL_TOKEN to indicate that a default null token should be used. This default null
token can be specified in the configuration using hibernate.search.default_null_token. If
this property is not set the string "_null_" will be used as default.

Note

When indexNullAs is used, it is important to use the chosen null token in

search queries (see Querying) in order to find null values. It is also advisable
to use this feature only with un-analyzed fields (analyze=Analyze.NO).

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Warning

When implementing a custom FieldBridge or TwoWayFieldBridge it is up

to the developer to handle the indexing of null values (see JavaDocs of
LuceneOptions.indexNullAs()).

4.1.1.3. @NumericField

There exists also a companion annotation to @Field, called @NumericField. It can be specified
in the same scope as @Field or @DocumentId, but only on Integer, Long, Float or Double
properties. When used, the annoated property will be indexed using a Trie structure [http://
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trie]. This enables efficient range queries and sorting, resulting in query
response times being orders of magnitude faster than the same query with plain @Field. The
@NumericField annotation accepts the following parameters:

Value Definition
forField (Optional) Specify the name of of the related
@Field that will be indexed as numeric. It's
only mandatory when the property contains
more than a @Field declaration
precisionStep (Optional) Change the way that the Trie
structure is stored in the index. Smaller
precisionSteps lead to more disk space usage
and faster range and sort queries. Larger
values lead to less space used and range
query performance more close to the range
query in normal @Fields. Default value is 4.

Lucene supports the numeric types: Double, Long, Integer and Float. Other numeric types should
use the default string encoding (via @Field), unless the application can deal with a potential loss in
precision, in which case a custom NumericFieldBridge can be used. See Example 4.2, “Defining
a custom NumericFieldBridge for BigDecimal”.

Example 4.2. Defining a custom NumericFieldBridge for BigDecimal

public class BigDecimalNumericFieldBridge extends NumericFieldBridge {

private static final BigDecimal storeFactor = BigDecimal.valueOf(100);

@Override
public void set(String name, Object value, Document document, LuceneOptions luceneOptions) {
if ( value != null ) {
BigDecimal decimalValue = (BigDecimal) value;
Long indexedValue = Long.valueOf( decimalValue.multiply( storeFactor ).longValue() );

50
 Basic mapping

luceneOptions.addNumericFieldToDocument( name, indexedValue, document );

}
}

@Override
public Object get(String name, Document document) {
String fromLucene = document.get( name );
BigDecimal storedBigDecimal = new BigDecimal( fromLucene );
return storedBigDecimal.divide( storeFactor );
}

You would use this custom bridge like seen in Example 4.3, “Use of
BigDecimalNumericFieldBridge”. In this case three annotations are used - @Field,
@NumericField and @FieldBridge. @Field is required to mark the property for being indexed (a
standalone @NumericField is never allowed). @NumericField might be ommited in this specific
case, because the used @FieldBridge annotation refers already to a NumericFieldBridge
instance. However, the use of @NumericField is recommended to make the use of the property
as numeric value explicit.

Example 4.3. Use of BigDecimalNumericFieldBridge

@Entity
@Indexed
public static class Item {
@Id
@GeneratedValue
private int id;

@Field
@NumericField
@FieldBridge(impl = BigDecimalNumericFieldBridge.class)
private BigDecimal price;

public int getId() {

return id;
}

public BigDecimal getPrice() {

return price;
}

public void setPrice(BigDecimal price) {

this.price = price;
}
}

4.1.1.4. @Id
Finally, the id property of an entity is a special property used by Hibernate Search to ensure index
unicity of a given entity. By design, an id has to be stored and must not be tokenized. To mark a

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property as index id, use the @DocumentId annotation. If you are using JPA and you have specified
@Id you can omit @DocumentId. The chosen entity id will also be used as document id.

Example 4.4. Specifying indexed properties

@Entity
@Indexed
public class Essay {
...

@Id
@DocumentId
public Long getId() { return id; }

@Field(name="Abstract", store=Store.YES)
public String getSummary() { return summary; }

@Lob
@Field
public String getText() { return text; }

@Field
@NumericField(precisionStep = 6)
public float getGrade() { return grade; }
}

Example 4.4, “Specifying indexed properties” defines an index with four fields: id , Abstract,
text and grade . Note that by default the field name is decapitalized, following the JavaBean
specification. The grade field is annotated as Numeric with a slightly larger precisionStep than
the default.

4.1.2. Mapping properties multiple times

Sometimes one has to map a property multiple times per index, with slightly different indexing
strategies. For example, sorting a query by field requires the field to be un-analyzed. If one wants
to search by words in this property and still sort it, one need to index it twice - once analyzed and
once un-analyzed. @Fields allows to achieve this goal.

Example 4.5. Using @Fields to map a property multiple times

@Entity
@Indexed(index = "Book")
public class Book {
@Fields( {
@Field,
@Field(name = "summary_forSort", analyze = Analyze.NO, store = Store.YES)
} )
public String getSummary() {
return summary;
}

52
 Embedded and associated objects

...
}

In Example 4.5, “Using @Fields to map a property multiple times” the field summary is indexed
twice, once as summary in a tokenized way, and once as summary_forSort in an untokenized
way. @Field supports 2 attributes useful when @Fields is used:

• analyzer: defines a @Analyzer annotation per field rather than per property

• bridge: defines a @FieldBridge annotation per field rather than per property

See below for more information about analyzers and field bridges.

4.1.3. Embedded and associated objects

Associated objects as well as embedded objects can be indexed as part of the root entity index.
This is useful if you expect to search a given entity based on properties of associated objects.
In Example 4.6, “Indexing associations”t the aim is to return places where the associated city is
Atlanta (In the Lucene query parser language, it would translate into address.city:Atlanta).
The place fields will be indexed in the Place index. The Place index documents will also contain
the fields address.id, address.street, and address.city which you will be able to query.

Example 4.6. Indexing associations

@Entity
@Indexed
public class Place {
@Id
@GeneratedValue
@DocumentId
private Long id;

@Field
private String name;

@OneToOne(cascade = { CascadeType.PERSIST, CascadeType.REMOVE })

@IndexedEmbedded
private Address address;
....
}

@Entity
public class Address {
@Id
@GeneratedValue
private Long id;

@Field
private String street;

@Field
private String city;

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Chapter 4. Mapping entities t...

@ContainedIn
@OneToMany(mappedBy="address")
private Set<Place> places;
...
}

Be careful. Because the data is denormalized in the Lucene index when using the
@IndexedEmbedded technique, Hibernate Search needs to be aware of any change in the Place
object and any change in the Address object to keep the index up to date. To make sure the Place
Lucene document is updated when it's Address changes, you need to mark the other side of the
bidirectional relationship with @ContainedIn.

Tip
@ContainedIn is useful on both associations pointing to entities and on embedded
(collection of) objects.

Let's make Example 4.6, “Indexing associations” a bit more complex by nesting
@IndexedEmbedded as seen in Example 4.7, “Nested usage of @IndexedEmbedded and
@ContainedIn”.

Example 4.7. Nested usage of @IndexedEmbedded and @ContainedIn

@Entity
@Indexed
public class Place {
@Id
@GeneratedValue
@DocumentId
private Long id;

@Field
private String name;

@OneToOne(cascade = { CascadeType.PERSIST, CascadeType.REMOVE })

@IndexedEmbedded
private Address address;
....
}

@Entity
public class Address {
@Id
@GeneratedValue
private Long id;

@Field
private String street;

@Field
private String city;

54
 Embedded and associated objects

@IndexedEmbedded(depth = 1, prefix = "ownedBy_")

private Owner ownedBy;

@ContainedIn
@OneToMany(mappedBy="address")
private Set<Place> places;
...
}

@Embeddable
public class Owner {
@Field
private String name;
...
}

As you can see, any @*ToMany, @*ToOne and @Embedded attribute can be annotated with
@IndexedEmbedded. The attributes of the associated class will then be added to the main entity
index. In Example 4.7, “Nested usage of @IndexedEmbedded and @ContainedIn” the index will
contain the following fields

• id

• name

• address.street

• address.city

• address.ownedBy_name

The default prefix is propertyName., following the traditional object navigation convention. You
can override it using the prefix attribute as it is shown on the ownedBy property.

Note
The prefix cannot be set to the empty string.

The depth property is necessary when the object graph contains a cyclic dependency of classes
(not instances). For example, if Owner points to Place. Hibernate Search will stop including
Indexed embedded attributes after reaching the expected depth (or the object graph boundaries
are reached). A class having a self reference is an example of cyclic dependency. In our example,
because depth is set to 1, any @IndexedEmbedded attribute in Owner (if any) will be ignored.

Using @IndexedEmbedded for object associations allows you to express queries (using Lucene's
query syntax) such as:

• Return places where name contains JBoss and where address city is Atlanta. In Lucene query
this would be

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Chapter 4. Mapping entities t...

+name:jboss +address.city:atlanta

• Return places where name contains JBoss and where owner's name contain Joe. In Lucene
query this would be

+name:jboss +address.ownedBy_name:joe

In a way it mimics the relational join operation in a more efficient way (at the cost of data
duplication). Remember that, out of the box, Lucene indexes have no notion of association, the
join operation is simply non-existent. It might help to keep the relational model normalized while
benefiting from the full text index speed and feature richness.

Note

An associated object can itself (but does not have to) be @Indexed

When @IndexedEmbedded points to an entity, the association has to be directional and the other
side has to be annotated @ContainedIn (as seen in the previous example). If not, Hibernate
Search has no way to update the root index when the associated entity is updated (in our example,
a Place index document has to be updated when the associated Address instance is updated).

Sometimes, the object type annotated by @IndexedEmbedded is not the object type targeted by
Hibernate and Hibernate Search. This is especially the case when interfaces are used in lieu
of their implementation. For this reason you can override the object type targeted by Hibernate
Search using the targetElement parameter.

Example 4.8. Using the targetElement property of @IndexedEmbedded

@Entity
@Indexed
public class Address {
@Id
@GeneratedValue
@DocumentId
private Long id;

@Field
private String street;

@IndexedEmbedded(depth = 1, prefix = "ownedBy_", targetElement = Owner.class)

@Target(Owner.class)
private Person ownedBy;

...
}

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 Embedded and associated objects

@Embeddable
public class Owner implements Person { ... }

4.1.3.1. Limiting object embedding to specific paths

The @IndexedEmbedded annotation provides also an attribute includePaths which can be used
as an alternative to depth, or be combined with it.

When using only depth all indexed fields of the embedded type will be added recursively at the
same depth; this makes it harder to pick only a specific path without adding all other fields as well,
which might not be needed.

To avoid unnecessarily loading and indexing entities you can specify exactly which paths are
needed. A typical application might need different depths for different paths, or in other words it
might need to specify paths explicitly, as shown in Example 4.9, “Using the includePaths property
of @IndexedEmbedded”

Example 4.9. Using the includePaths property of @IndexedEmbedded

@Entity
@Indexed
public class Person {

@Id
public int getId() {
return id;
}

@Field
public String getName() {
return name;
}

@Field
public String getSurname() {
return surname;
}

@OneToMany
@IndexedEmbedded(includePaths = { "name" })
public Set<Person> getParents() {
return parents;
}

@ContainedIn
@ManyToOne
public Human getChild() {
return child;
}

...//other fields omitted

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Chapter 4. Mapping entities t...

Using a mapping as in Example 4.9, “Using the includePaths property of @IndexedEmbedded”,

you would be able to search on a Person by name and/or surname, and/or the name of the parent.
It will not index the surname of the parent, so searching on parent's surnames will not be possible
but speeds up indexing, saves space and improve overall performance.

The @IndexedEmbedded includePaths will include the specified paths in addition to what you
would index normally specifying a limited value for depth. When using includePaths, and leaving
depth undefined, behavior is equivalent to setting depth=0: only the included paths are indexed.

Example 4.10. Using the includePaths property of @IndexedEmbedded

@Entity
@Indexed
public class Human {

@Id
public int getId() {
return id;
}

@Field
public String getName() {
return name;
}

@Field
public String getSurname() {
return surname;
}

@OneToMany
@IndexedEmbedded(depth = 2, includePaths = { "parents.parents.name" })
public Set<Human> getParents() {
return parents;
}

@ContainedIn
@ManyToOne
public Human getChild() {
return child;
}

...//other fields omitted

In Example 4.10, “Using the includePaths property of @IndexedEmbedded”, every human will
have it's name and surname attributes indexed. The name and surname of parents will be indexed
too, recursively up to second line because of the depth attribute. It will be possible to search by
name or surname, of the person directly, his parents or of his grand parents. Beyond the second
level, we will in addition index one more level but only the name, not the surname.

This results in the following fields in the index:

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 Boosting

• id - as primary key

• _hibernate_class - stores entity type

• name - as direct field

• surname - as direct field

• parents.name - as embedded field at depth 1

• parents.surname - as embedded field at depth 1

• parents.parents.name - as embedded field at depth 2

• parents.parents.surname - as embedded field at depth 2

• parents.parents.parents.name - as additional path as specifyed by includePaths. The first

parents. is inferred from the field name, the remaining path is the attribute of includePaths

Having explicit control of the indexed paths might be easier if you're designing your application by
defining the needed queries first, as at that point you might know exactly which fields you need,
and which other fields are unnecessary to implement your use case.

4.2. Boosting
Lucene has the notion of boosting which allows you to give certain documents or fields more or
less importance than others. Lucene differentiates between index and search time boosting. The
following sections show you how you can achieve index time boosting using Hibernate Search.

4.2.1. Static index time boosting

To define a static boost value for an indexed class or property you can use the @Boost annotation.
You can use this annotation within @Field or specify it directly on method or class level.

Example 4.11. Different ways of using @Boost

@Entity
@Indexed
@Boost(1.7f)
public class Essay {
...

@Id
@DocumentId
public Long getId() { return id; }

@Field(name="Abstract", store=Store.YES, boost=@Boost(2f))

@Boost(1.5f)
public String getSummary() { return summary; }

@Lob
@Field(boost=@Boost(1.2f))

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Chapter 4. Mapping entities t...

public String getText() { return text; }

@Field
public String getISBN() { return isbn; }

In Example 4.11, “Different ways of using @Boost”, Essay's probability to reach the top of the
search list will be multiplied by 1.7. The summary field will be 3.0 (2 * 1.5, because @Field.boost
and @Boost on a property are cumulative) more important than the isbn field. The text field will
be 1.2 times more important than the isbn field. Note that this explanation is wrong in strictest
terms, but it is simple and close enough to reality for all practical purposes. Please check the
Lucene documentation or the excellent Lucene In Action from Otis Gospodnetic and Erik Hatcher.

4.2.2. Dynamic index time boosting

The @Boost annotation used in Section 4.2.1, “Static index time boosting” defines a static boost
factor which is independent of the state of of the indexed entity at runtime. However, there are
usecases in which the boost factor may depend on the actual state of the entity. In this case you
can use the @DynamicBoost annotation together with an accompanying custom BoostStrategy.

Example 4.12. Dynamic boost example

public enum PersonType {

NORMAL,
VIP
}

@Entity
@Indexed
@DynamicBoost(impl = VIPBoostStrategy.class)
public class Person {
private PersonType type;

// ....
}

public class VIPBoostStrategy implements BoostStrategy {

public float defineBoost(Object value) {
Person person = ( Person ) value;
if ( person.getType().equals( PersonType.VIP ) ) {
return 2.0f;
}
else {
return 1.0f;
}
}
}

In Example 4.12, “Dynamic boost example” a dynamic boost is defined on class level specifying
VIPBoostStrategy as implementation of the BoostStrategy interface to be used at indexing

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 Analysis

time. You can place the @DynamicBoost either at class or field level. Depending on the placement
of the annotation either the whole entity is passed to the defineBoost method or just the annotated
field/property value. It's up to you to cast the passed object to the correct type. In the example all
indexed values of a VIP person would be double as important as the values of a normal person.

Note

The specified BoostStrategy implementation must define a public no-arg

constructor.

Of course you can mix and match @Boost and @DynamicBoost annotations in your entity. All
defined boost factors are cumulative.

4.3. Analysis
Analysis is the process of converting text into single terms (words) and can be considered as
one of the key features of a fulltext search engine. Lucene uses the concept of Analyzers to
control this process. In the following section we cover the multiple ways Hibernate Search offers
to configure the analyzers.

4.3.1. Default analyzer and analyzer by class

The default analyzer class used to index tokenized fields is configurable through
the hibernate.search.analyzer property. The default value for this property is
org.apache.lucene.analysis.standard.StandardAnalyzer.

You can also define the analyzer class per entity, property and even per @Field (useful when
multiple fields are indexed from a single property).

Example 4.13. Different ways of using @Analyzer

@Entity
@Indexed
@Analyzer(impl = EntityAnalyzer.class)
public class MyEntity {
@Id
@GeneratedValue
@DocumentId
private Integer id;

@Field
private String name;

@Field
@Analyzer(impl = PropertyAnalyzer.class)
private String summary;

@Field(analyzer = @Analyzer(impl = FieldAnalyzer.class)

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private String body;

...
}

In this example, EntityAnalyzer is used to index all tokenized properties (eg. name), except
summary and body which are indexed with PropertyAnalyzer and FieldAnalyzer respectively.

Caution

Mixing different analyzers in the same entity is most of the time a bad practice. It
makes query building more complex and results less predictable (for the novice),
especially if you are using a QueryParser (which uses the same analyzer for the
whole query). As a rule of thumb, for any given field the same analyzer should be
used for indexing and querying.

4.3.2. Named analyzers

Analyzers can become quite complex to deal with. For this reason introduces Hibernate Search
the notion of analyzer definitions. An analyzer definition can be reused by many @Analyzer
declarations and is composed of:

• a name: the unique string used to refer to the definition

• a list of char filters: each char filter is responsible to pre-process input characters before the
tokenization. Char filters can add, change or remove characters; one common usage is for
characters normalization

• a tokenizer: responsible for tokenizing the input stream into individual words

• a list of filters: each filter is responsible to remove, modify or sometimes even add words into
the stream provided by the tokenizer

This separation of tasks - a list of char filters, and a tokenizer followed by a list of filters - allows
for easy reuse of each individual component and let you build your customized analyzer in a very
flexible way (just like Lego). Generally speaking the char filters do some pre-processing in the
character input, then the Tokenizer starts the tokenizing process by turning the character input
into tokens which are then further processed by the TokenFilters. Hibernate Search supports
this infrastructure by utilizing the Solr analyzer framework.

Note

Some of the analyzers and filters will require additional dependencies. For example
to use the snowball stemmer you have to also include the lucene-snowball

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 Named analyzers

jar and for the PhoneticFilterFactory you need the commons-codec [http://
commons.apache.org/codec] jar. Your distribution of Hibernate Search provides
these dependencies in its lib/optional directory. Have a look at Table 4.2,
“Example of available tokenizers” and Table 4.3, “Examples of available filters” to
see which anaylzers and filters have additional dependencies

Prior to Search version 3.3.0.Beta2 it was required to add the Solr dependency
org.apache.solr:solr-core when you wanted to use the analyzer definition
framework. In case you are using Maven this is no longer needed: all
required Solr dependencies are now defined as dependencies of the artifact
org.hibernate:hibernate-search-analyzers; just add the following dependency :

<dependency>
<groupId>org.hibernate</groupId>
<artifactId>hibernate-search-analyzers</artifactId>
<version>4.5.3.Final</version>
<dependency>

Let's have a look at a concrete example now - Example 4.14, “@AnalyzerDef and the Solr
framework”. First a char filter is defined by its factory. In our example, a mapping char filter is used,
and will replace characters in the input based on the rules specified in the mapping file. Next a
tokenizer is defined. This example uses the standard tokenizer. Last but not least, a list of filters
is defined by their factories. In our example, the StopFilter filter is built reading the dedicated
words property file. The filter is also expected to ignore case.

Example 4.14. @AnalyzerDef and the Solr framework

@AnalyzerDef(name="customanalyzer",
charFilters = {
@CharFilterDef(factory = MappingCharFilterFactory.class, params = {
@Parameter(name = "mapping",
value = "org/hibernate/search/test/analyzer/solr/mapping-chars.properties")
})
},
tokenizer = @TokenizerDef(factory = StandardTokenizerFactory.class),
filters = {
@TokenFilterDef(factory = ISOLatin1AccentFilterFactory.class),
@TokenFilterDef(factory = LowerCaseFilterFactory.class),
@TokenFilterDef(factory = StopFilterFactory.class, params = {
@Parameter(name="words",
value= "org/hibernate/search/test/analyzer/solr/stoplist.properties" ),
@Parameter(name="ignoreCase", value="true")
})
})
public class Team {
...
}

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Tip
Filters and char filters are applied in the order they are defined in the @AnalyzerDef
annotation. Order matters!

Some tokenizers, token filters or char filters load resources like a configuration or metadata file.
This is the case for the stop filter and the synonym filter. If the resource charset is not using the
VM default, you can explicitly specify it by adding a resource_charset parameter.

Example 4.15. Use a specific charset to load the property file

@AnalyzerDef(name="customanalyzer",
charFilters = {
@CharFilterDef(factory = MappingCharFilterFactory.class, params = {
@Parameter(name = "mapping",
value = "org/hibernate/search/test/analyzer/solr/mapping-chars.properties")
})
},
tokenizer = @TokenizerDef(factory = StandardTokenizerFactory.class),
filters = {
@TokenFilterDef(factory = ISOLatin1AccentFilterFactory.class),
@TokenFilterDef(factory = LowerCaseFilterFactory.class),
@TokenFilterDef(factory = StopFilterFactory.class, params = {
@Parameter(name="words",
value= "org/hibernate/search/test/analyzer/solr/stoplist.properties" ),
@Parameter(name="resource_charset", value = "UTF-16BE"),
@Parameter(name="ignoreCase", value="true")
})
})
public class Team {
...
}

Once defined, an analyzer definition can be reused by an @Analyzer declaration as seen in

Example 4.16, “Referencing an analyzer by name”.

Example 4.16. Referencing an analyzer by name

@Entity
@Indexed
@AnalyzerDef(name="customanalyzer", ... )
public class Team {
@Id
@DocumentId
@GeneratedValue
private Integer id;

@Field
private String name;

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 Named analyzers

@Field
private String location;

@Field
@Analyzer(definition = "customanalyzer")
private String description;
}

Analyzer instances declared by @AnalyzerDef are also available by their name in the
SearchFactory which is quite useful wen building queries.

Analyzer analyzer = fullTextSession.getSearchFactory().getAnalyzer("customanalyzer");

Fields in queries should be analyzed with the same analyzer used to index the field so that they
speak a common "language": the same tokens are reused between the query and the indexing
process. This rule has some exceptions but is true most of the time. Respect it unless you know
what you are doing.

4.3.2.1. Available analyzers

Solr and Lucene come with a lot of useful default char filters, tokenizers and filters. You can find a
complete list of char filter factories, tokenizer factories and filter factories at http://wiki.apache.org/
solr/AnalyzersTokenizersTokenFilters. Let's check a few of them.

Table 4.1. Example of available char filters

Factory Description Parameters Additional

dependencies
Replaces one or more mapping:
MappingCharFilterFactory points to none
characters with one a resource file
or more characters, containing the
based on mappings mappings using the
specified in the format:
resource file

"á" =>
"a"
"ñ" =>
"n"
"ø" =>
"o"

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Factory Description Parameters Additional

dependencies
Remove
HTMLStripCharFilterFactory HTML none none
standard tags,
keeping the text

Table 4.2. Example of available tokenizers

Factory Description Parameters Additional
dependencies
Use
StandardTokenizerFactory the Lucene none none
StandardTokenizer
Remove HTML tags, none
HTMLStripCharFilterFactory solr-core
keep the text and
pass it to a
StandardTokenizer.
Breaks
PatternTokenizerFactory text at pattern: the regular solr-core
the specified regular expression to use for
expression pattern. tokenizing

group: says which

pattern group to
extract into tokens

Table 4.3. Examples of available filters

Factory Description Parameters Additional
dependencies
Remove
StandardFilterFactory dots from none solr-core
acronyms and 's from
words
Lowercases all words
LowerCaseFilterFactory none solr-core

StopFilterFactory Remove words words: points to solr-core

(tokens) matching a a resource file
list of stop words containing the stop
words

ignoreCase: true if
case should be ignore
when comparing
stop words, false
otherwise
Reduces
SnowballPorterFilterFactory a word language: Danish, solr-core
to it's root in Dutch, English,

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 Named analyzers

Factory Description Parameters Additional

dependencies
a given language. Finnish, French,
(eg. protect, protects, German, Italian,
protection share the Norwegian,
same root). Using Portuguese, Russian,
such a filter allows Spanish, Swedish and
searches matching a few more
related words.
Remove accents for none
ISOLatin1AccentFilterFactory solr-core
languages like French
Inserts
PhoneticFilterFactory phonetically encoder: One of solr-core and
similar tokens into the DoubleMetaphone, commons-codec
token stream Metaphone, Soundex
or RefinedSoundex

inject: true will add

tokens to the stream,
false will replace the
existing token

maxCodeLength: sets
the maximum length
of the code to be
generated. Supported
only for Metaphone
and
DoubleMetaphone
encodings
Converts each token custom,
CollationKeyFilterFactory language, solr-core and
into its country, variant, commons-io
java.text.CollationKey ,
strength ,
and then encodes the decomposition see
CollationKey with Lucene's
IndexableBinaryStringTools ,
CollationKeyFilter
to allow it to be stored javadocs for more info
as an index term.

We recommend to check all the implementations

of
org.apache.solr.analysis.TokenizerFactory and
org.apache.solr.analysis.TokenFilterFactory in your IDE to see the implementations
available.

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Chapter 4. Mapping entities t...

4.3.3. Dynamic analyzer selection

So far all the introduced ways to specify an analyzer were static. However, there are use cases
where it is useful to select an analyzer depending on the current state of the entity to be indexed,
for example in a multilingual applications. For an BlogEntry class for example the analyzer could
depend on the language property of the entry. Depending on this property the correct language
specific stemmer should be chosen to index the actual text.

To enable this dynamic analyzer selection Hibernate Search introduces the

AnalyzerDiscriminator annotation. Example 4.17, “Usage of @AnalyzerDiscriminator”
demonstrates the usage of this annotation.

Example 4.17. Usage of @AnalyzerDiscriminator

@Entity
@Indexed
@AnalyzerDefs({
@AnalyzerDef(name = "en",
tokenizer = @TokenizerDef(factory = StandardTokenizerFactory.class),
filters = {
@TokenFilterDef(factory = LowerCaseFilterFactory.class),
@TokenFilterDef(factory = EnglishPorterFilterFactory.class
)
}),
@AnalyzerDef(name = "de",
tokenizer = @TokenizerDef(factory = StandardTokenizerFactory.class),
filters = {
@TokenFilterDef(factory = LowerCaseFilterFactory.class),
@TokenFilterDef(factory = GermanStemFilterFactory.class)
})
})
public class BlogEntry {

@Id
@GeneratedValue
@DocumentId
private Integer id;

@Field
@AnalyzerDiscriminator(impl = LanguageDiscriminator.class)
private String language;

@Field
private String text;

private Set<BlogEntry> references;

// standard getter/setter
...
}

public class LanguageDiscriminator implements Discriminator {

68
 Retrieving an analyzer

public String getAnalyzerDefinitionName(Object value, Object entity, String field) {

if ( value == null || !( entity instanceof Article ) ) {
return null;
}
return (String) value;

}
}

The prerequisite for using @AnalyzerDiscriminator is that all analyzers which are going to
be used dynamically are predefined via @AnalyzerDef definitions. If this is the case, one can
place the @AnalyzerDiscriminator annotation either on the class or on a specific property
of the entity for which to dynamically select an analyzer. Via the impl parameter of the
AnalyzerDiscriminator you specify a concrete implementation of the Discriminator interface.
It is up to you to provide an implementation for this interface. The only method you have to
implement is getAnalyzerDefinitionName() which gets called for each field added to the
Lucene document. The entity which is getting indexed is also passed to the interface method. The
value parameter is only set if the AnalyzerDiscriminator is placed on property level instead of
class level. In this case the value represents the current value of this property.

An implemention of the Discriminator interface has to return the name of an existing analyzer
definition or null if the default analyzer should not be overridden. Example 4.17, “Usage of
@AnalyzerDiscriminator” assumes that the language parameter is either 'de' or 'en' which matches
the specified names in the @AnalyzerDefs.

4.3.4. Retrieving an analyzer

In some situations retrieving analyzers can be handy. For example, if your domain model makes
use of multiple analyzers (maybe to benefit from stemming, use phonetic approximation and so
on), you need to make sure to use the same analyzers when you build your query.

Note

This rule can be broken but you need a good reason for it. If you are unsure, use
the same analyzers. If you use the Hibernate Search query DSL (see Section 5.1.2,
“Building a Lucene query with the Hibernate Search query DSL”), you don't have
to think about it. The query DSL does use the right analyzer transparently for you.

Whether you are using the Lucene programmatic API or the Lucene query parser, you can retrieve
the scoped analyzer for a given entity. A scoped analyzer is an analyzer which applies the right
analyzers depending on the field indexed. Remember, multiple analyzers can be defined on a
given entity each one working on an individual field. A scoped analyzer unifies all these analyzers
into a context-aware analyzer. While the theory seems a bit complex, using the right analyzer in
a query is very easy.

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Example 4.18. Using the scoped analyzer when building a full-text query

org.apache.lucene.queryParser.QueryParser parser = new QueryParser(

"title",
fullTextSession.getSearchFactory().getAnalyzer( Song.class )
);

org.apache.lucene.search.Query luceneQuery =
parser.parse( "title:sky Or title_stemmed:diamond" );

org.hibernate.Query fullTextQuery =
fullTextSession.createFullTextQuery( luceneQuery, Song.class );

List result = fullTextQuery.list(); //return a list of managed objects

In the example above, the song title is indexed in two fields: the standard analyzer is used in the
field title and a stemming analyzer is used in the field title_stemmed. By using the analyzer
provided by the search factory, the query uses the appropriate analyzer depending on the field
targeted.

Tip
You can also retrieve analyzers defined via @AnalyzerDef by their definition name
using searchFactory.getAnalyzer(String).

4.4. Bridges
When discussing the basic mapping for an entity one important fact was so far disregarded. In
Lucene all index fields have to be represented as strings. All entity properties annotated with
@Field have to be converted to strings to be indexed. The reason we have not mentioned it so
far is, that for most of your properties Hibernate Search does the translation job for you thanks
to a set of built-in bridges. However, in some cases you need a more fine grained control over
the translation process.

4.4.1. Built-in bridges

Hibernate Search comes bundled with a set of built-in bridges between a Java property type and
its full text representation.

null
Per default null elements are not indexed. Lucene does not support null elements. However,
in some situation it can be useful to insert a custom token representing the null value. See
Section 4.1.1.2, “@Field” for more information.

java.lang.String
Strings are indexed as are

70
 Built-in bridges

short, Short, integer, Integer, long, Long, float, Float, double, Double, BigInteger, BigDecimal
Numbers are converted into their string representation. Note that numbers cannot be
compared by Lucene (ie used in ranged queries) out of the box: they have to be padded

Note

Using a Range query has drawbacks; an alternative approach is to use a Filter

query which will filter the result query to the appropriate range.

Hibernate Search will support a padding mechanism

java.util.Date
Dates are stored as yyyyMMddHHmmssSSS in GMT time (200611072203012 for Nov 7th of
2006 4:03PM and 12ms EST). You shouldn't really bother with the internal format. What is
important is that when using a TermRangeQuery, you should know that the dates have to be
expressed in GMT time.

Usually, storing the date up to the millisecond is not necessary. @DateBridge

defines the appropriate resolution you are willing to store in the index
(@DateBridge(resolution=Resolution.DAY)). The date pattern will then be truncated
accordingly.

@Entity
@Indexed
public class Meeting {
@Field(analyze=Analyze.NO)
@DateBridge(resolution=Resolution.MINUTE)
private Date date;
...

Warning

A Date whose resolution is lower than MILLISECOND cannot be a @DocumentId

Important

The default Date bridge uses Lucene's DateTools to convert from and to
String. This means that all dates are expressed in GMT time. If your
requirements are to store dates in a fixed time zone you have to implement
a custom date bridge. Make sure you understand the requirements of your
applications regarding to date indexing and searching.

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java.net.URI, java.net.URL
URI and URL are converted to their string representation

java.lang.Class
Class are converted to their fully qualified class name. The thread context classloader is used
when the class is rehydrated

4.4.2. Tika bridge

Hibernate Search allows you to extract text from various document types using the built-in
TikaBridge which utilizes Apache Tika [http://tika.apache.org] to extract text and metadata from
the provided documents. The TikaBridge annotation can be used with String, URI, byte[] or
java.sql.Blob properties. In the case of String and URI the bridge interprets the values are file
paths and tries to open a file to parse the document. In the case of byte[] and Blob the values
are directly passed to Tika for parsing.

Tika uses metadata as in- and output of the parsing process and it also allows to provide additional
context information. This process is described in Parser interface [http://tika.apache.org/1.1/
parser.html#apiorgapachetikametadataMetadata.html]. The Hibernate Search Tika bridge allows
you to make use of these additional configuration options by providing two interfaces in
conjunction with TikaBridge. The first interface is the TikaParseContextProvider. It allows
you to create a custom ParseContext for the document parsing. The second interface is
TikaMetadataProcessor which has two methods - prepareMetadata() and set(String,
Object, Document, LuceneOptions, Metadata metadata). The former allows to add additional
metadata to the parsing process (for example the file name) and the latter allows you to index
metadata discovered during the parsing process.

TikaParseContextProvider as well as TikaMetadataProcessor implementation classes can

both be specified as parameters on the TikaBridge annotation.

Example 4.19. Example mapping with Apache Tika

@Entity
@Indexed
public class Song {
@Id
@GeneratedValue
long id;

@Field
@TikaBridge(metadataProcessor = Mp3TikaMetadataProcessor.class)
String mp3FileName;

[...]
}

QueryBuilder queryBuilder = fullTextSession.getSearchFactory()

72
 Custom bridges

.buildQueryBuilder()
.forEntity( Song.class )
.get();
Query query = queryBuilder.keyword()
.onField( "mp3FileName" )
.ignoreFieldBridge() //mandatory
.matching( "Apes" )
.createQuery();
List result = fullTextSession.createFullTextQuery( query ).list();

In the Example 4.19, “Example mapping with Apache Tika” the property mp3FileName represents
a path to an MP3 file; the headers of this file will be indexed and so the performed query will be
able to match the MP3 metadata.

Warning
TikaBridge does not implement TwoWayFieldBridge: queries built using the DSL
(as in the Example 4.19, “Example mapping with Apache Tika”) need to explicitly
enable the option ignoreFieldBridge().

4.4.3. Custom bridges

Sometimes, the built-in bridges of Hibernate Search do not cover some of your property types,
or the String representation used by the bridge does not meet your requirements. The following
paragraphs describe several solutions to this problem.

4.4.3.1. StringBridge
The simplest custom solution is to give Hibernate Search an implementation of
your expected Object to String bridge. To do so you need to implement the
org.hibernate.search.bridge.StringBridge interface. All implementations have to be
thread-safe as they are used concurrently.

Example 4.20. Custom StringBridge implementation

/**
* Padding Integer bridge.
* All numbers will be padded with 0 to match 5 digits
*
* @author Emmanuel Bernard
*/
public class PaddedIntegerBridge implements StringBridge {

private int padding = 5;

public String objectToString(Object object) {

String rawInteger = ((Integer) object).toString();
if (rawInteger.length() > padding)
throw new IllegalArgumentException("Number too big to be padded");

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StringBuilder paddedInteger = new StringBuilder();

for (int padIndex = rawInteger.length(); padIndex < padding; padIndex++) {
paddedInteger.append('0');
}
return paddedInteger.append( rawInteger ).toString();
}
}

Given the string bridge defined in Example 4.20, “Custom StringBridge implementation”, any
property or field can use this bridge thanks to the @FieldBridge annotation:

@FieldBridge(impl = PaddedIntegerBridge.class)
private Integer length;

4.4.3.1.1. Parameterized bridge

Parameters can also be passed to the bridge implementation making it more flexible.
Example 4.21,
“Passing parameters to your bridge implementation” implements a
ParameterizedBridge interface and parameters are passed through the @FieldBridge
annotation.

Example 4.21. Passing parameters to your bridge implementation

public class PaddedIntegerBridge implements StringBridge, ParameterizedBridge {

public static String PADDING_PROPERTY = "padding";

private int padding = 5; //default

public void setParameterValues(Map<String,String> parameters) {

String padding = parameters.get( PADDING_PROPERTY );
if (padding != null) this.padding = Integer.parseInt( padding );
}

public String objectToString(Object object) {

String rawInteger = ((Integer) object).toString();
if (rawInteger.length() > padding)
throw new IllegalArgumentException("Number too big to be padded");
StringBuilder paddedInteger = new StringBuilder( );
for (int padIndex = rawInteger.length(); padIndex < padding; padIndex++) {
paddedInteger.append('0');
}
return paddedInteger.append(rawInteger).toString();
}
}

//on the property:

@FieldBridge(impl = PaddedIntegerBridge.class,
params = @Parameter(name="padding", value="10")
)
private Integer length;

74
 Custom bridges

The ParameterizedBridgeinterface can be implemented by StringBridge,

TwoWayStringBridge, FieldBridge implementations.

All implementations have to be thread-safe, but the parameters are set during initialization and
no special care is required at this stage.

4.4.3.1.2. Type aware bridge

It is sometimes useful to get the type the bridge is applied on:

• the return type of the property for field/getter-level bridges

• the class type for class-level bridges

An example is a bridge that deals with enums in a custom fashion but needs to access the actual
enum type. Any bridge implementing AppliedOnTypeAwareBridge will get the type the bridge is
applied on injected. Like parameters, the type injected needs no particular care with regard to
thread-safety.

4.4.3.1.3. Two-way bridge

If you expect to use your bridge implementation on an id property (ie annotated with @DocumentId
), you need to use a slightly extended version of StringBridge named TwoWayStringBridge.
Hibernate Search needs to read the string representation of the identifier and generate the object
out of it. There is no difference in the way the @FieldBridge annotation is used.

Example 4.22. Implementing a TwoWayStringBridge usable for id properties

public class PaddedIntegerBridge implements TwoWayStringBridge, ParameterizedBridge {

public static String PADDING_PROPERTY = "padding";

private int padding = 5; //default

public void setParameterValues(Map parameters) {

Object padding = parameters.get(PADDING_PROPERTY);
if (padding != null) this.padding = (Integer) padding;
}

public String objectToString(Object object) {

String rawInteger = ((Integer) object).toString();
if (rawInteger.length() > padding)
throw new IllegalArgumentException("Number too big to be padded");
StringBuilder paddedInteger = new StringBuilder();
for (int padIndex = rawInteger.length(); padIndex < padding ; padIndex++) {
paddedInteger.append('0');
}
return paddedInteger.append(rawInteger).toString();
}

public Object stringToObject(String stringValue) {

return new Integer(stringValue);
}
}

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//On an id property:
@DocumentId
@FieldBridge(impl = PaddedIntegerBridge.class,
params = @Parameter(name="padding", value="10")
private Integer id;

Important

It is important for the two-way process to be idempotent (ie object =

stringToObject( objectToString( object ) ) ).

4.4.3.2. FieldBridge

Some use cases require more than a simple object to string translation when mapping a property
to a Lucene index. To give you the greatest possible flexibility you can also implement a bridge
as a FieldBridge. This interface gives you a property value and let you map it the way you want
in your Lucene Document. You can for example store a property in two different document fields.
The interface is very similar in its concept to the Hibernate UserTypes.

Example 4.23. Implementing the FieldBridge interface

/**
* Store the date in 3 different fields - year, month, day - to ease Range Query per
* year, month or day (eg get all the elements of December for the last 5 years).
* @author Emmanuel Bernard
*/
public class DateSplitBridge implements FieldBridge {
private final static TimeZone GMT = TimeZone.getTimeZone("GMT");

public void set(String name, Object value, Document document,

LuceneOptions luceneOptions) {
Date date = (Date) value;
Calendar cal = GregorianCalendar.getInstance(GMT);
cal.setTime(date);
int year = cal.get(Calendar.YEAR);
int month = cal.get(Calendar.MONTH) + 1;
int day = cal.get(Calendar.DAY_OF_MONTH);

// set year
luceneOptions.addFieldToDocument(
name + ".year",
String.valueOf( year ),
document );

// set month and pad it if needed

luceneOptions.addFieldToDocument(
name + ".month",
month < 10 ? "0" : "" + String.valueOf( month ),
document );

76
 Custom bridges

// set day and pad it if needed

luceneOptions.addFieldToDocument(
name + ".day",
day < 10 ? "0" : "" + String.valueOf( day ),
document );
}
}

//property
@FieldBridge(impl = DateSplitBridge.class)
private Date date;

In Example 4.23, “Implementing the FieldBridge interface” the fields are not added directly to
Document. Instead the addition is delegated to the LuceneOptions helper; this helper will apply
the options you have selected on @Field, like Store or TermVector, or apply the choosen @Boost
value. It is especially useful to encapsulate the complexity of COMPRESS implementations. Even
though it is recommended to delegate to LuceneOptions to add fields to the Document, nothing
stops you from editing the Document directly and ignore the LuceneOptions in case you need to.

Tip

Classes like LuceneOptions are created to shield your application from changes
in Lucene API and simplify your code. Use them if you can, but if you need more
flexibility you're not required to.

4.4.3.3. ClassBridge

It is sometimes useful to combine more than one property of a given entity and index
this combination in a specific way into the Lucene index. The @ClassBridge respectively
@ClassBridges annotations can be defined at class level (as opposed to the property level). In this
case the custom field bridge implementation receives the entity instance as the value parameter
instead of a particular property. Though not shown in Example 4.24, “Implementing a class
bridge”, @ClassBridge supports the termVector attribute discussed in section Section 4.1.1,
“Basic mapping”.

Example 4.24. Implementing a class bridge

@Entity
@Indexed
@ClassBridge(name="branchnetwork",
store=Store.YES,
impl = CatFieldsClassBridge.class,
params = @Parameter( name="sepChar", value=" " ) )
public class Department {
private int id;
private String network;
private String branchHead;

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private String branch;

private Integer maxEmployees
...
}

public class CatFieldsClassBridge implements FieldBridge, ParameterizedBridge {

private String sepChar;

public void setParameterValues(Map parameters) {

this.sepChar = (String) parameters.get( "sepChar" );
}

public void set(

String name, Object value, Document document, LuceneOptions luceneOptions) {
// In this particular class the name of the new field was passed
// from the name field of the ClassBridge Annotation. This is not
// a requirement. It just works that way in this instance. The
// actual name could be supplied by hard coding it below.
Department dep = (Department) value;
String fieldValue1 = dep.getBranch();
if ( fieldValue1 == null ) {
fieldValue1 = "";
}
String fieldValue2 = dep.getNetwork();
if ( fieldValue2 == null ) {
fieldValue2 = "";
}
String fieldValue = fieldValue1 + sepChar + fieldValue2;
Field field = new Field( name, fieldValue, luceneOptions.getStore(),
luceneOptions.getIndex(), luceneOptions.getTermVector() );
field.setBoost( luceneOptions.getBoost() );
document.add( field );
}
}

In this example, the particular CatFieldsClassBridge is applied to the department instance, the
field bridge then concatenate both branch and network and index the concatenation.

4.5. Conditional indexing: to index or not based on

entity state

Important

This feature is considered experimental. More operation types might be added in

the future depending on user feedback.

In some situations, you want to index an entity only when it is in a given state, for example:

• only index blog entries marked as published

• no longer index invoices when they are marked archived

78
 Conditional indexing: to index or not based on entity state

This serves both functional and technical needs. You don't want your blog readers to find your
draft entries and filtering them off the query is a bit annoying. Very few of your entities are actually
required to be indexed and you want to limit indexing overhead and keep indexes small and fast.

Hibernate Search lets you intercept entity indexing operations and override them. It is quite simple:

• Write an EntityIndexingInterceptor class with your entity state based logic

• Mark the entity as intercepted by this implementation

Let's look at the blog example at Example 4.25, “Index blog entries only when they are published
and remove them when they are in a different state”

Example 4.25. Index blog entries only when they are published and remove
them when they are in a different state

/**
* Only index blog when it is in published state
*
* @author Emmanuel Bernard <[email protected]>
*/
public class IndexWhenPublishedInterceptor implements EntityIndexingInterceptor<Blog> {
@Override
public IndexingOverride onAdd(Blog entity) {
if (entity.getStatus() == BlogStatus.PUBLISHED) {
return IndexingOverride.APPLY_DEFAULT;
}
return IndexingOverride.SKIP;
}

@Override
public IndexingOverride onUpdate(Blog entity) {
if (entity.getStatus() == BlogStatus.PUBLISHED) {
return IndexingOverride.UPDATE;
}
return IndexingOverride.REMOVE;
}

@Override
public IndexingOverride onDelete(Blog entity) {
return IndexingOverride.APPLY_DEFAULT;
}

@Override
public IndexingOverride onCollectionUpdate(Blog entity) {
return onUpdate(entity);
}
}

@Entity
@Indexed(interceptor=IndexWhenPublishedInterceptor.class)
public class Blog {
@Id

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@GeneratedValue
public Integer getId() { return id; }
public void setId(Integer id) { this.id = id; }
private Integer id;

@Field
public String getTitle() { return title; }
public void setTitle(String title) { this.title = title; }
private String title;

public BlogStatus getStatus() { return status; }

public void setStatus(BlogStatus status) { this.status = status; }
private BlogStatus status;

[...]
}

We mark the Blog entity with @Indexed.interceptor. As you can see,

IndexWhenPublishedInterceptor implements EntityIndexingInterceptor and accepts Blog
entities (it could have accepted superclasses as well - for example Object if you create a generic
interceptor.

You can react to several planned indexing events:

• when an entity is added to your datastore

• when an entity is updated in your datastore

• when an entity is deleted from your datastore

• when a collection own by this entity is updated in your datastore

For each occurring event you can respond with one of the following actions:

• APPLY_DEFAULT: that's the basic operation that lets Hibernate Search update the index as
expected - creating, updating or removing the document

• SKIP: ask Hibernate Search to not do anything to the index for this event - data will not be
created, updated or removed from the index in any way

• REMOVE: ask Hibernate Search to remove indexing data about this entity - you can safely ask
for REMOVE even if the entity has not yet been indexed

• UPDATE: ask Hibernate Search to either index or update the index for this entity - it is safe to
ask for UPDATE even if the entity has never been indexed

Note
Be careful, not every combination makes sense: for example, asking to UPDATE the
index upon onDelete. Note that you could ask for SKIP in this situation if saving
indexing time is critical for you. That's rarely the case though.

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 Providing your own id

By default, no interceptor is applied on an entity. You have to explicitly define an interceptor via
the @Indexed annotation (see Section 4.1.1.1, “@Indexed”) or programmatically (see Section 4.7,
“Programmatic API”). This class and all its subclasses will then be intercepted. You can stop
or change the interceptor used in a subclass by overriding @Indexed.interceptor. Hibernate
Search provides DontInterceptEntityInterceptor which will explicitly not intercept any call.
This is useful to reset interception within a class hierarchy.

Note

Dirty checking optimization is disabled when interceptors are used. Dirty checking
optimization does check what has changed in an entity and only triggers an
index update if indexed properties are changed. The reason is simple, your
interceptor might depend on a non indexed property which would be ignored by
this optimization.

Warning

An EntityIndexingInterceptor can never override an explicit indexing

operation such as index(T), purge(T, id) or purgeAll(class).

4.6. Providing your own id

You can provide your own id for Hibernate Search if you are extending the internals. You will have
to generate a unique value so it can be given to Lucene to be indexed. This will have to be given
to Hibernate Search when you create an org.hibernate.search.Work object - the document id is
required in the constructor.

4.6.1. The ProvidedId annotation

Unlike @DocumentIdwhich is applied on field level, @ProvidedId is used on the class level.
Optionally you can specify your own bridge implementation using the bridge property. Also, if
you annotate a class with @ProvidedId, your subclasses will also get the annotation - but it is not
done by using the java.lang.annotations.@Inherited. Be sure however, to not use this annotation
with @DocumentId as your system will break.

Example 4.26. Providing your own id

@ProvidedId(bridge = org.my.own.package.MyCustomBridge)
@Indexed
public class MyClass{
@Field
String MyString;
...

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4.7. Programmatic API

Although the recommended approach for mapping indexed entities is to use annotations, it is
sometimes more convenient to use a different approach:

• the same entity is mapped differently depending on deployment needs (customization for
clients)

• some automatization process requires the dynamic mapping of many entities sharing common
traits

While it has been a popular demand in the past, the Hibernate team never found the idea of an
XML alternative to annotations appealing due to it's heavy duplication, lack of code refactoring
safety, because it did not cover all the use case spectrum and because we are in the 21st century :)

The idea of a programmatic API was much more appealing and has now become a reality. You
can programmatically define your mapping using a programmatic API: you define entities and
fields as indexable by using mapping classes which effectively mirror the annotation concepts in
Hibernate Search. Note that fan(s) of XML approach can design their own schema and use the
programmatic API to create the mapping while parsing the XML stream.

In order to use the programmatic model you must first construct a SearchMapping object which
you can do in two ways:

• directly

• via a factory

You can pass the SearchMapping object directly via the property key
hibernate.search.model_mapping or the constant Environment.MODEL_MAPPING. Use the
Configuration API or the Map passed to the JPA Persistence bootstrap methods.

Example 4.27. Programmatic mapping

SearchMapping mapping = new SearchMapping();

[...] //configure mapping
Configuration config = new Configuration();
config.getProperties().put( Environment.MODEL_MAPPING, mapping );
SessionFactory sf = config.buildSessionFactory();

Example 4.28. Programmatic mapping with JPA

SearchMapping mapping = new SearchMapping();

[...] //configure mapping
Map props = new HashMap();

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 Programmatic API

props.put( Environment.MODEL_MAPPING, mapping );

EntityManagerFactory emf = Persistence.createEntityManagerFactory( "userPU", props );

Alternatively, you can create a factory class (ie. hosting a method annotated with
@Factory) whose factory method returns the SearchMapping object. The factory
class must have a no-arg constructor and its fully qualified class name is passed
to the property key hibernate.search.model_mapping or its type-safe representation
Environment.MODEL_MAPPING. This approach is useful when you do not necessarily control the
bootstrap process like in a Java EE, CDI or Spring Framework container.

Example 4.29. Use a mapping factory

public class MyAppSearchMappingFactory {

@Factory
public SearchMapping getSearchMapping() {
SearchMapping mapping = new SearchMapping();
mapping
.analyzerDef( "ngram", StandardTokenizerFactory.class )
.filter( LowerCaseFilterFactory.class )
.filter( NGramFilterFactory.class )
.param( "minGramSize", "3" )
.param( "maxGramSize", "3" );
return mapping;
}
}

<persistence ...>
<persistence-unit name="users">
...
<properties>
<property name="hibernate.search.model_mapping"
value="com.acme.MyAppSearchMappingFactory"/>
</properties>
</persistence-unit>
</persistence>

The SearchMapping is the root object which contains all the necessary indexable entities and
fields. From there, the SearchMapping object exposes a fluent (and thus intuitive) API to express
your mappings: it contextually exposes the relevant mapping options in a type-safe way. Just let
your IDE autocompletion feature guide you through.

Today, the programmatic API cannot be used on a class annotated with Hibernate Search
annotations, chose one approach or the other. Also note that the same default values apply in
annotations and the programmatic API. For example, the @Field.name is defaulted to the property
name and does not have to be set.

Each core concept of the programmatic API has a corresponding example to depict how the
same definition would look using annotation. Therefore seeing an annotation example of the

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programmatic approach should give you a clear picture of what Hibernate Search will build with
the marked entities and associated properties.

4.7.1. Mapping an entity as indexable

The first concept of the programmatic API is to define an entity as indexable. Using the annotation
approach a user would mark the entity as @Indexed, the following example demonstrates how to
programmatically achieve this.

Example 4.30. Marking an entity indexable

SearchMapping mapping = new SearchMapping();

mapping.entity(Address.class)
.indexed()
.indexName("Address_Index") //optional
.interceptor(IndexWhenPublishedInterceptor.class); //optional

cfg.getProperties().put( "hibernate.search.model_mapping", mapping );

As you can see you must first create a SearchMapping object which is the root object that is
then passed to the Configuration object as property. You must declare an entity and if you
wish to make that entity as indexable then you must call the indexed() method. The indexed()
method has an optional indexName(String indexName) which can be used to change the
default index name that is created by Hibernate Search. Likewise, an interceptor(Class<?
extends EntityIndexedInterceptor>) is available. Using the annotation model the above can
be achieved as:

Example 4.31. Annotation example of indexing entity

@Entity
@Indexed(index="Address_Index", interceptor=IndexWhenPublishedInterceptor.class)
public class Address {
....
}

4.7.2. Adding DocumentId to indexed entity

To set a property as a document id:

Example 4.32. Enabling document id with programmatic model

SearchMapping mapping = new SearchMapping();

mapping.entity(Address.class).indexed()

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 Defining analyzers

.property("addressId", ElementType.FIELD) //field access

.documentId()
.name("id");

cfg.getProperties().put( "hibernate.search.model_mapping", mapping);

The above is equivalent to annotating a property in the entity as @DocumentId as seen in the
following example:

Example 4.33. DocumentId annotation definition

@Entity
@Indexed
public class Address {
@Id
@GeneratedValue
@DocumentId(name="id")
private Long addressId;

....
}

The next section demonstrates how to programmatically define analyzers.

4.7.3. Defining analyzers

Analyzers can be programmatically defined using the analyzerDef(String analyzerDef,

Class<? extends TokenizerFactory> tokenizerFactory) method. This method also enables
you to define filters for the analyzer definition. Each filter that you define can optionally take in
parameters as seen in the following example :

Example 4.34. Defining analyzers using programmatic model

SearchMapping mapping = new SearchMapping();

mapping
.analyzerDef( "ngram", StandardTokenizerFactory.class )
.filter( LowerCaseFilterFactory.class )
.filter( NGramFilterFactory.class )
.param( "minGramSize", "3" )
.param( "maxGramSize", "3" )
.analyzerDef( "en", StandardTokenizerFactory.class )
.filter( LowerCaseFilterFactory.class )
.filter( EnglishPorterFilterFactory.class )
.analyzerDef( "de", StandardTokenizerFactory.class )
.filter( LowerCaseFilterFactory.class )
.filter( GermanStemFilterFactory.class )
.entity(Address.class).indexed()
.property("addressId", ElementType.METHOD) //getter access
.documentId()

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.name("id");

cfg.getProperties().put( "hibernate.search.model_mapping", mapping );

The analyzer mapping defined above is equivalent to the annotation model using @AnalyzerDef
in conjunction with @AnalyzerDefs:

Example 4.35. Analyzer definition using annotation

@Indexed
@Entity
@AnalyzerDefs({
@AnalyzerDef(name = "ngram",
tokenizer = @TokenizerDef(factory = StandardTokenizerFactory.class),
filters = {
@TokenFilterDef(factory = LowerCaseFilterFactory.class),
@TokenFilterDef(factory = NGramFilterFactory.class,
params = {
@Parameter(name = "minGramSize",value = "3"),
@Parameter(name = "maxGramSize",value = "3")
})
}),
@AnalyzerDef(name = "en",
tokenizer = @TokenizerDef(factory = StandardTokenizerFactory.class),
filters = {
@TokenFilterDef(factory = LowerCaseFilterFactory.class),
@TokenFilterDef(factory = EnglishPorterFilterFactory.class)
}),

@AnalyzerDef(name = "de",
tokenizer = @TokenizerDef(factory = StandardTokenizerFactory.class),
filters = {
@TokenFilterDef(factory = LowerCaseFilterFactory.class),
@TokenFilterDef(factory = GermanStemFilterFactory.class)
})

})
public class Address {
...
}

4.7.4. Defining full text filter definitions

The programmatic API provides easy mechanism for defining full text filter definitions which
is available via @FullTextFilterDef and @FullTextFilterDefs (see Section 5.3, “Filters”).
The next example depicts the creation of full text filter definition using the fullTextFilterDef
method.

Example 4.36. Defining full text definition programmatically

SearchMapping mapping = new SearchMapping();

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 Defining full text filter definitions

mapping
.analyzerDef( "en", StandardTokenizerFactory.class )
.filter( LowerCaseFilterFactory.class )
.filter( EnglishPorterFilterFactory.class )
.fullTextFilterDef("security", SecurityFilterFactory.class)
.cache(FilterCacheModeType.INSTANCE_ONLY)
.entity(Address.class)
.indexed()
.property("addressId", ElementType.METHOD)
.documentId()
.name("id")
.property("street1", ElementType.METHOD)
.field()
.analyzer("en")
.store(Store.YES)
.field()
.name("address_data")
.analyzer("en")
.store(Store.NO);

cfg.getProperties().put( "hibernate.search.model_mapping", mapping );

The previous example can effectively been seen as annotating your entity with
@FullTextFilterDef like below:

Example 4.37. Using annotation to define full text filter definition

@Entity
@Indexed
@AnalyzerDefs({
@AnalyzerDef(name = "en",
tokenizer = @TokenizerDef(factory = StandardTokenizerFactory.class),
filters = {
@TokenFilterDef(factory = LowerCaseFilterFactory.class),
@TokenFilterDef(factory = EnglishPorterFilterFactory.class)
})
})
@FullTextFilterDefs({
@FullTextFilterDef(name = "security", impl = SecurityFilterFactory.class, cache = FilterCacheModeType.INSTANCE_ON
})
public class Address {

@Id
@GeneratedValue
@DocumentId(name="id")
pubblic Long getAddressId() {...};

@Fields({
@Field(store=Store.YES, analyzer=@Analyzer(definition="en")),
@Field(name="address_data", analyzer=@Analyzer(definition="en"))
})
public String getAddress1() {...};

......

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4.7.5. Defining fields for indexing

When defining fields for indexing using the programmatic API, call field() on the
property(String propertyName, ElementType elementType) method. From field() you
can specify the name, index, store, bridge and analyzer definitions.

Example 4.38. Indexing fields using programmatic API

SearchMapping mapping = new SearchMapping();

mapping
.analyzerDef( "en", StandardTokenizerFactory.class )
.filter( LowerCaseFilterFactory.class )
.filter( EnglishPorterFilterFactory.class )
.entity(Address.class).indexed()
.property("addressId", ElementType.METHOD)
.documentId()
.name("id")
.property("street1", ElementType.METHOD)
.field()
.analyzer("en")
.store(Store.YES)
.field()
.name("address_data")
.analyzer("en");

cfg.getProperties().put( "hibernate.search.model_mapping", mapping );

The above example of marking fields as indexable is equivalent to defining fields using @Field
as seen below:

Example 4.39. Indexing fields using annotation

@Entity
@Indexed
@AnalyzerDefs({
@AnalyzerDef(name = "en",
tokenizer = @TokenizerDef(factory = StandardTokenizerFactory.class),
filters = {
@TokenFilterDef(factory = LowerCaseFilterFactory.class),
@TokenFilterDef(factory = EnglishPorterFilterFactory.class)
})
})
public class Address {

@Id
@GeneratedValue
@DocumentId(name="id")
private Long getAddressId() {...};

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 Programmatically defining embedded entities

@Fields({
@Field(store=Store.YES, analyzer=@Analyzer(definition="en")),
@Field(name="address_data", analyzer=@Analyzer(definition="en"))
})
public String getAddress1() {...}

......
}

Note
When using a programmatic mapping for a given type X, you can only refer to fields
defined on X. Fields or methods inherited from a super type are not configurable. In
case you need to configure a super class property, you need to either override the
property in X or create a programmatic mapping for the super class. This mimics
the usage of annotations where you cannot annotate a field or method of a super
class either, unless it is redefined in the given type.

4.7.6. Programmatically defining embedded entities

In this section you will see how to programmatically define entities to be embedded into the indexed
entity similar to using the @IndexedEmbedded model. In order to define this you must mark the
property as indexEmbedded.There is the option to add a prefix to the embedded entity definition
which can be done by calling prefix as seen in the example below:

Example 4.40. Programmatically defining embedded entites

SearchMapping mapping = new SearchMapping();

mapping
.entity(ProductCatalog.class)
.indexed()
.property("catalogId", ElementType.METHOD)
.documentId()
.name("id")
.property("title", ElementType.METHOD)
.field()
.index(Index.YES)
.store(Store.NO)
.property("description", ElementType.METHOD)
.field()
.index(Index.YES)
.store(Store.NO)
.property("items", ElementType.METHOD)
.indexEmbedded()
.prefix("catalog.items"); //optional

cfg.getProperties().put( "hibernate.search.model_mapping", mapping );

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The next example shows the same definition using annotation (@IndexedEmbedded):

Example 4.41. Using @IndexedEmbedded

@Entity
@Indexed
public class ProductCatalog {
@Id
@GeneratedValue
@DocumentId(name="id")
public Long getCatalogId() {...}

@Field
public String getTitle() {...}

@Field
public String getDescription();

@OneToMany(fetch = FetchType.LAZY)
@IndexColumn(name = "list_position")
@Cascade(org.hibernate.annotations.CascadeType.ALL)
@IndexedEmbedded(prefix="catalog.items")
public List<Item> getItems() {...}

...

4.7.7. Contained In definition

@ContainedIn can be define as seen in the example below:

Example 4.42. Programmatically defining ContainedIn

SearchMapping mapping = new SearchMapping();

mapping
.entity(ProductCatalog.class)
.indexed()
.property("catalogId", ElementType.METHOD)
.documentId()
.property("title", ElementType.METHOD)
.field()
.property("description", ElementType.METHOD)
.field()
.property("items", ElementType.METHOD)
.indexEmbedded()

.entity(Item.class)
.property("description", ElementType.METHOD)
.field()
.property("productCatalog", ElementType.METHOD)
.containedIn();

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 Date/Calendar Bridge

cfg.getProperties().put( "hibernate.search.model_mapping", mapping );

This is equivalent to defining @ContainedIn in your entity:

Example 4.43. Annotation approach for ContainedIn

@Entity
@Indexed
public class ProductCatalog {

@Id
@GeneratedValue
@DocumentId
public Long getCatalogId() {...}

@Field
public String getTitle() {...}

@Field
public String getDescription() {...}

@OneToMany(fetch = FetchType.LAZY)
@IndexColumn(name = "list_position")
@Cascade(org.hibernate.annotations.CascadeType.ALL)
@IndexedEmbedded
private List<Item> getItems() {...}

...
}

@Entity
public class Item {

@Id
@GeneratedValue
private Long itemId;

@Field
public String getDescription() {...}

@ManyToOne( cascade = { CascadeType.PERSIST, CascadeType.REMOVE } )

@ContainedIn
public ProductCatalog getProductCatalog() {...}

...
}

4.7.8. Date/Calendar Bridge

In order to define a calendar or date bridge mapping, call the dateBridge(Resolution

resolution) or calendarBridge(Resolution resolution) methods after you have defined a
field() in the SearchMapping hierarchy.

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Example 4.44. Programmatic model for defining calendar/date bridge

SearchMapping mapping = new SearchMapping();

mapping
.entity(Address.class)
.indexed()
.property("addressId", ElementType.FIELD)
.documentId()
.property("street1", ElementType.FIELD()
.field()
.property("createdOn", ElementType.FIELD)
.field()
.dateBridge(Resolution.DAY)
.property("lastUpdated", ElementType.FIELD)
.calendarBridge(Resolution.DAY);

cfg.getProperties().put( "hibernate.search.model_mapping", mapping );

See below for defining the above using @CalendarBridge and @DateBridge:

Example 4.45. @CalendarBridge and @DateBridge definition

@Entity
@Indexed
public class Address {

@Id
@GeneratedValue
@DocumentId
private Long addressId;

@Field
private String address1;

@Field
@DateBridge(resolution=Resolution.DAY)
private Date createdOn;

@CalendarBridge(resolution=Resolution.DAY)
private Calendar lastUpdated;

...
}

4.7.9. Defining bridges

It is possible to associate bridges to programmatically defined fields. When you define a

field() programmatically you can use the bridge(Class<?> impl) to associate a FieldBridge
implementation class. The bridge method also provides optional methods to include any

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 Mapping class bridge

parameters required for the bridge class. The below shows an example of programmatically
defining a bridge:

Example 4.46. Defining field bridges programmatically

SearchMapping mapping = new SearchMapping();

mapping
.entity(Address.class)
.indexed()
.property("addressId", ElementType.FIELD)
.documentId()
.property("street1", ElementType.FIELD)
.field()
.field()
.name("street1_abridged")
.bridge( ConcatStringBridge.class )
.param( "size", "4" );

cfg.getProperties().put( "hibernate.search.model_mapping", mapping );

The above can equally be defined using annotations, as seen in the next example.

Example 4.47. Defining field bridges using annotation

@Entity
@Indexed
public class Address {

@Id
@GeneratedValue
@DocumentId(name="id")
private Long addressId;

@Fields({
@Field,
@Field(name="street1_abridged",
bridge = @FieldBridge( impl = ConcatStringBridge.class,
params = @Parameter( name="size", value="4" ))
})
private String address1;

...
}

4.7.10. Mapping class bridge

You can define class bridges on entities programmatically. This is shown in the next example:

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Example 4.48. Defining class briges using API

SearchMapping mapping = new SearchMapping();

mapping
.entity(Departments.class)
.classBridge(CatDeptsFieldsClassBridge.class)
.name("branchnetwork")
.index(Index.YES)
.store(Store.YES)
.param("sepChar", " ")
.classBridge(EquipmentType.class)
.name("equiptype")
.index(Index.YES)
.store(Store.YES)
.param("C", "Cisco")
.param("D", "D-Link")
.param("K", "Kingston")
.param("3", "3Com")
.indexed();

cfg.getProperties().put( "hibernate.search.model_mapping", mapping );

The above is similar to using @ClassBridge as seen in the next example:

Example 4.49. Using @ClassBridge

@Entity
@Indexed
@ClassBridges ( {
@ClassBridge(name="branchnetwork",
store= Store.YES,
impl = CatDeptsFieldsClassBridge.class,
params = @Parameter( name="sepChar", value=" " ) ),
@ClassBridge(name="equiptype",
store= Store.YES,
impl = EquipmentType.class,
params = {@Parameter( name="C", value="Cisco" ),
@Parameter( name="D", value="D-Link" ),
@Parameter( name="K", value="Kingston" ),
@Parameter( name="3", value="3Com" )
})
})
public class Departments {

....
}

4.7.11. Mapping dynamic boost

You can apply a dynamic boost factor on either a field or a whole entity:

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 Mapping dynamic boost

Example 4.50. DynamicBoost mapping using programmatic model

SearchMapping mapping = new SearchMapping();

mapping
.entity(DynamicBoostedDescLibrary.class)
.indexed()
.dynamicBoost(CustomBoostStrategy.class)
.property("libraryId", ElementType.FIELD)
.documentId().name("id")
.property("name", ElementType.FIELD)
.dynamicBoost(CustomFieldBoostStrategy.class);
.field()
.store(Store.YES)

cfg.getProperties().put( "hibernate.search.model_mapping", mapping );

The next example shows the equivalent mapping using the @DynamicBoost annotation:

Example 4.51. Using the @DynamicBoost

@Entity
@Indexed
@DynamicBoost(impl = CustomBoostStrategy.class)
public class DynamicBoostedDescriptionLibrary {

@Id
@GeneratedValue
@DocumentId
private int id;

private float dynScore;

@Field(store = Store.YES)
@DynamicBoost(impl = CustomFieldBoostStrategy.class)
private String name;

public DynamicBoostedDescriptionLibrary() {
dynScore = 1.0f;
}

.......
}

95
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Chapter 5.

Querying
The second most important capability of Hibernate Search is the ability to execute Lucene queries
and retrieve entities managed by a Hibernate session. The search provides the power of Lucene
without leaving the Hibernate paradigm, giving another dimension to the Hibernate classic search
mechanisms (HQL, Criteria query, native SQL query).

Preparing and executing a query consists of four simple steps:

• Creating a FullTextSession

• Creating a Lucene query either via the Hibernate Search query DSL (recommended) or by
utilizing the Lucene query API

• Wrapping the Lucene query using an org.hibernate.Query

• Executing the search by calling for example list() or scroll()

To access the querying facilities, you have to use a FullTextSession. This Search specific
session wraps a regular org.hibernate.Session in order to provide query and indexing
capabilities.

Example 5.1. Creating a FullTextSession

Session session = sessionFactory.openSession();

...
FullTextSession fullTextSession = Search.getFullTextSession(session);

Once you have a FullTextSession you have two options to build the full-text query: the Hibernate
Search query DSL or the native Lucene query.

If you use the Hibernate Search query DSL, it will look like this:

QueryBuilder b = fullTextSession.getSearchFactory()
.buildQueryBuilder().forEntity(Myth.class).get();

org.apache.lucene.search.Query luceneQuery =
b.keyword()
.onField("history").boostedTo(3)
.matching("storm")
.createQuery();

org.hibernate.Query fullTextQuery = fullTextSession.createFullTextQuery(luceneQuery);

List result = fullTextQuery.list(); //return a list of managed objects

You can alternatively write your Lucene query either using the Lucene query parser or Lucene
programmatic API.

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Chapter 5. Querying

Example 5.2. Creating a Lucene query via the QueryParser

SearchFactory searchFactory = fullTextSession.getSearchFactory();

org.apache.lucene.queryParser.QueryParser parser =
new QueryParser("title", searchFactory.getAnalyzer(Myth.class));
try {
org.apache.lucene.search.Query luceneQuery = parser.parse("history:storm^3");
}
catch (ParseException e) {
//handle parsing failure
}

org.hibernate.Query fullTextQuery = fullTextSession.createFullTextQuery(luceneQuery);

List result = fullTextQuery.list(); //return a list of managed objects

Note

The Hibernate query built on top of the Lucene query is a regular

org.hibernate.Query, which means you are in the same paradigm as the
other Hibernate query facilities (HQL, Native or Criteria). The regular list() ,
uniqueResult(), iterate() and scroll() methods can be used.

In case you are using the Java Persistence APIs of Hibernate, the same extensions exist:

Example 5.3. Creating a Search query using the JPA API

EntityManager em = entityManagerFactory.createEntityManager();

FullTextEntityManager fullTextEntityManager =
org.hibernate.search.jpa.Search.getFullTextEntityManager(em);

...
QueryBuilder b = fullTextEntityManager.getSearchFactory()
.buildQueryBuilder().forEntity( Myth.class ).get();

org.apache.lucene.search.Query luceneQuery =
b.keyword()
.onField("history").boostedTo(3)
.matching("storm")
.createQuery();
javax.persistence.Query fullTextQuery =
fullTextEntityManager.createFullTextQuery( luceneQuery );

List result = fullTextQuery.getResultList(); //return a list of managed objects

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 Building queries

Note

The following examples we will use the Hibernate APIs but the same example can
be easily rewritten with the Java Persistence API by just adjusting the way the
FullTextQuery is retrieved.

5.1. Building queries

Hibernate Search queries are built on top of Lucene queries which gives you total freedom on the
type of Lucene query you want to execute. However, once built, Hibernate Search wraps further
query processing using org.hibernate.Query as your primary query manipulation API.

5.1.1. Building a Lucene query using the Lucene API

Using the Lucene API, you have several options. You can use the query parser (fine for simple
queries) or the Lucene programmatic API (for more complex use cases). It is out of the scope
of this documentation on how to exactly build a Lucene query. Please refer to the online Lucene
documentation or get hold of a copy of Lucene In Action or Hibernate Search in Action.

5.1.2. Building a Lucene query with the Hibernate Search query

DSL
Writing full-text queries with the Lucene programmatic API is quite complex. It's even more
complex to understand the code once written. Besides the inherent API complexity, you have to
remember to convert your parameters to their string equivalent as well as make sure to apply the
correct analyzer to the right field (a ngram analyzer will for example use several ngrams as the
tokens for a given word and should be searched as such).

The Hibernate Search query DSL makes use of a style of API called a fluent API. This API has
a few key characteristics:

• it has meaningful method names making a succession of operations reads almost like English

• it limits the options offered to what makes sense in a given context (thanks to strong typing and
IDE autocompletion).

• It often uses the chaining method pattern

• it's easy to use and even easier to read

Let's see how to use the API. You first need to create a query builder that is attached to a given
indexed entity type. This QueryBuilder will know what analyzer to use and what field bridge to
apply. You can create several QueryBuilders (one for each entity type involved in the root of
your query). You get the QueryBuilder from the SearchFactory.

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Chapter 5. Querying

QueryBuilder mythQB = searchFactory.buildQueryBuilder().forEntity( Myth.class ).get();

You can also override the analyzer used for a given field or fields. This is rarely needed and should
be avoided unless you know what you are doing.

QueryBuilder mythQB = searchFactory.buildQueryBuilder()

.forEntity( Myth.class )
.overridesForField("history","stem_analyzer_definition")
.get();

Using the query builder, you can then build queries. It is important to realize that the end result of a
QueryBuilder is a Lucene query. For this reason you can easily mix and match queries generated
via Lucene's query parser or Query objects you have assembled with the Lucene programmatic
API and use them with the Hibernate Search DSL. Just in case the DSL is missing some features.

5.1.2.1. Keyword queries

Let's start with the most basic use case - searching for a specific word:

Query luceneQuery = mythQB.keyword().onField("history").matching("storm").createQuery();

keyword() means that you are trying to find a specific word. onField() specifies in which Lucene
field to look. matching() tells what to look for. And finally createQuery() creates the Lucene
query object. A lot is going on with this line of code.

• The value storm is passed through the history FieldBridge: it does not matter here but you
will see that it's quite handy when dealing with numbers or dates.

• The field bridge value is then passed to the analyzer used to index the field history. This
ensures that the query uses the same term transformation than the indexing (lower case, n-
gram, stemming and so on). If the analyzing process generates several terms for a given word,
a boolean query is used with the SHOULD logic (roughly an OR logic).

Let's see how you can search a property that is not of type string.

@Entity
@Indexed
public class Myth {
@Field(analyze = Analyze.NO)
@DateBridge(resolution = Resolution.YEAR)
public Date getCreationDate() { return creationDate; }
public Date setCreationDate(Date creationDate) { this.creationDate = creationDate; }
private Date creationDate;

100
 Building a Lucene query with the Hibernate Search query DSL

...
}

Date birthdate = ...;

Query luceneQuery = mythQb.keyword().onField("creationDate").matching(birthdate).createQuery();

Note
In plain Lucene, you would have had to convert the Date object to its string
representation (in this case the year).

This conversion works for any object, not just Date, provided that the FieldBridge has an
objectToString method (and all built-in FieldBridge implementations do).

We make the example a little more advanced now and have a look at how to search a field that
uses ngram analyzers. ngram analyzers index succession of ngrams of your words which helps
to recover from user typos. For example the 3-grams of the word hibernate are hib, ibe, ber, rna,
nat, ate.

@AnalyzerDef(name = "ngram",
tokenizer = @TokenizerDef(factory = StandardTokenizerFactory.class ),
filters = {
@TokenFilterDef(factory = StandardFilterFactory.class),
@TokenFilterDef(factory = LowerCaseFilterFactory.class),
@TokenFilterDef(factory = StopFilterFactory.class),
@TokenFilterDef(factory = NGramFilterFactory.class,
params = {
@Parameter(name = "minGramSize", value = "3"),
@Parameter(name = "maxGramSize", value = "3") } )
}
)
@Entity
@Indexed
public class Myth {
@Field(analyzer=@Analyzer(definition="ngram")
@DateBridge(resolution = Resolution.YEAR)
public String getName() { return name; }
public String setName(Date name) { this.name = name; }
private String name;

...
}

Date birthdate = ...;

Query luceneQuery = mythQb.keyword().onField("name").matching("Sisiphus")
.createQuery();

The matching word "Sisiphus" will be lower-cased and then split into 3-grams: sis, isi, sip, phu,
hus. Each of these n-gram will be part of the query. We will then be able to find the Sysiphus myth
(with a y). All that is transparently done for you.

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Note

If for some reason you do not want a specific field to use the field bridge or the
analyzer you can call the ignoreAnalyzer() or ignoreFieldBridge() functions

To search for multiple possible words in the same field, simply add them all in the matching clause.

//search document with storm or lightning in their history

Query luceneQuery =
mythQB.keyword().onField("history").matching("storm lightning").createQuery();

To search the same word on multiple fields, use the onFields method.

Query luceneQuery = mythQB

.keyword()
.onFields("history","description","name")
.matching("storm")
.createQuery();

Sometimes, one field should be treated differently from another field even if searching the same
term, you can use the andField() method for that.

Query luceneQuery = mythQB.keyword()

.onField("history")
.andField("name")
.boostedTo(5)
.andField("description")
.matching("storm")
.createQuery();

In the previous example, only field name is boosted to 5.

5.1.2.2. Fuzzy queries

To execute a fuzzy query (based on the Levenshtein distance algorithm), start like a keyword
query and add the fuzzy flag.

Query luceneQuery = mythQB

.keyword()
.fuzzy()
.withThreshold(.8f)
.withPrefixLength(1)
.onField("history")
.matching("starm")

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 Building a Lucene query with the Hibernate Search query DSL

.createQuery();

threshold is the limit above which two terms are considering matching. It's a decimal between
0 and 1 and defaults to 0.5. prefixLength is the length of the prefix ignored by the "fuzzyness":
while it defaults to 0, a non zero value is recommended for indexes containing a huge amount
of distinct terms.

5.1.2.3. Wildcard queries

You can also execute wildcard queries (queries where some of parts of the word are unknown). ?
represents a single character and * represents any character sequence. Note that for performance
purposes, it is recommended that the query does not start with either ? or *.

Query luceneQuery = mythQB

.keyword()
.wildcard()
.onField("history")
.matching("sto*")
.createQuery();

Note

Wildcard queries do not apply the analyzer on the matching terms. Otherwise the
risk of * or ? being mangled is too high.

5.1.2.4. Phrase queries

So far we have been looking for words or sets of words, you can also search exact or approximate
sentences. Use phrase() to do so.

Query luceneQuery = mythQB

.phrase()
.onField("history")
.sentence("Thou shalt not kill")
.createQuery();

You can search approximate sentences by adding a slop factor. The slop factor represents the
number of other words permitted in the sentence: this works like a within or near operator

Query luceneQuery = mythQB

.phrase()
.withSlop(3)
.onField("history")
.sentence("Thou kill")

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.createQuery();

5.1.2.5. Range queries

After looking at all these query examples for searching for to a given word, it is time to introduce
range queries (on numbers, dates, strings etc). A range query searches for a value in between
given boundaries (included or not) or for a value below or above a given boundary (included or
not).

//look for 0 <= starred < 3

Query luceneQuery = mythQB
.range()
.onField("starred")
.from(0).to(3).excludeLimit()
.createQuery();

//look for myths strictly BC

Date beforeChrist = ...;
Query luceneQuery = mythQB
.range()
.onField("creationDate")
.below(beforeChrist).excludeLimit()
.createQuery();

5.1.2.6. Combining queries

Finally, you can aggregate (combine) queries to create more complex queries. The following
aggregation operators are available:

• SHOULD: the query query should contain the matching elements of the subquery

• MUST: the query must contain the matching elements of the subquery

• MUST NOT: the query must not contain the matching elements of the subquery

The subqueries can be any Lucene query including a boolean query itself. Let's look at a few
examples:

//look for popular modern myths that are not urban

Date twentiethCentury = ...;
Query luceneQuery = mythQB
.bool()
.must( mythQB.keyword().onField("description").matching("urban").createQuery() )
.not()
.must( mythQB.range().onField("starred").above(4).createQuery() )
.must( mythQB
.range()
.onField("creationDate")
.above(twentiethCentury)

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 Building a Lucene query with the Hibernate Search query DSL

.createQuery() )
.createQuery();

//look for popular myths that are preferably urban

Query luceneQuery = mythQB
.bool()
.should( mythQB.keyword().onField("description").matching("urban").createQuery() )
.must( mythQB.range().onField("starred").above(4).createQuery() )
.createQuery();

//look for all myths except religious ones

Query luceneQuery = mythQB
.all()
.except( monthQb
.keyword()
.onField( "description_stem" )
.matching( "religion" )
.createQuery()
)
.createQuery();

5.1.2.7. Query options

We already have seen several query options in the previous example, but lets summarize again
the options for query types and fields:

• boostedTo (on query type and on field): boost the whole query or the specific field to a given
factor

• withConstantScore (on query): all results matching the query have a constant score equals
to the boost

• filteredBy(Filter) (on query): filter query results using the Filter instance

• ignoreAnalyzer (on field): ignore the analyzer when processing this field

• ignoreFieldBridge (on field): ignore field bridge when processing this field

Let's check out an example using some of these options

Query luceneQuery = mythQB

.bool()
.should( mythQB.keyword().onField("description").matching("urban").createQuery() )
.should( mythQB
.keyword()
.onField("name")
.boostedTo(3)
.ignoreAnalyzer()
.matching("urban").createQuery() )
.must( mythQB
.range()
.boostedTo(5).withConstantScore()
.onField("starred").above(4).createQuery() )

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.createQuery();

As you can see, the Hibernate Search query DSL is an easy to use and easy to read query API
and by accepting and producing Lucene queries, you can easily incorporate query types not (yet)
supported by the DSL. Please give us feedback!

5.1.3. Building a Hibernate Search query

So far we only covered the process of how to create your Lucene query (see Section 5.1, “Building
queries”). However, this is only the first step in the chain of actions. Let's now see how to build
the Hibernate Search query from the Lucene query.

5.1.3.1. Generality
Once the Lucene query is built, it needs to be wrapped into an Hibernate Query. If not specified
otherwise, the query will be executed against all indexed entities, potentially returning all types
of indexed classes.

Example 5.4. Wrapping a Lucene query into a Hibernate Query

FullTextSession fullTextSession = Search.getFullTextSession( session );

org.hibernate.Query fullTextQuery = fullTextSession.createFullTextQuery( luceneQuery );

It is advised, from a performance point of view, to restrict the returned types:

Example 5.5. Filtering the search result by entity type

fullTextQuery = fullTextSession
.createFullTextQuery(luceneQuery, Customer.class);

// or

fullTextQuery = fullTextSession
.createFullTextQuery(luceneQuery, Item.class, Actor.class);

In Example 5.5, “Filtering the search result by entity type” the first example returns only
matching Customers, the second returns matching Actors and Items. The type restriction is fully
polymorphic which means that if there are two indexed subclasses Salesman and Customer of
the baseclass Person, it is possible to just specify Person.class in order to filter on result types.

5.1.3.2. Pagination
Out of performance reasons it is recommended to restrict the number of returned objects per
query. In fact is a very common use case anyway that the user navigates from one page to an
other. The way to define pagination is exactly the way you would define pagination in a plain HQL
or Criteria query.

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Example 5.6. Defining pagination for a search query

org.hibernate.Query fullTextQuery =
fullTextSession.createFullTextQuery(luceneQuery, Customer.class);
fullTextQuery.setFirstResult(15); //start from the 15th element
fullTextQuery.setMaxResults(10); //return 10 elements

Tip

It is still possible to get the total number of matching elements regardless of the
pagination via fulltextQuery.getResultSize()

5.1.3.3. Sorting

Apache Lucene provides a very flexible and powerful way to sort results. While the default sorting
(by relevance) is appropriate most of the time, it can be interesting to sort by one or several other
properties. In order to do so set the Lucene Sort object to apply a Lucene sorting strategy.

Example 5.7. Specifying a Lucene Sort in order to sort the results

org.hibernate.search.FullTextQuery query = s.createFullTextQuery( query, Book.class );

org.apache.lucene.search.Sort sort = new Sort(
new SortField("title", SortField.STRING));
query.setSort(sort);
List results = query.list();

Tip

Be aware that fields used for sorting must not be tokenized (see Section 4.1.1.2,
“@Field”).

5.1.3.4. Fetching strategy

When you restrict the return types to one class, Hibernate Search loads the objects using a single
query. It also respects the static fetching strategy defined in your domain model.

It is often useful, however, to refine the fetching strategy for a specific use case.

Example 5.8. Specifying FetchMode on a query

Criteria criteria =

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s.createCriteria(Book.class).setFetchMode("authors", FetchMode.JOIN);
s.createFullTextQuery(luceneQuery).setCriteriaQuery(criteria);

In this example, the query will return all Books matching the luceneQuery. The authors collection
will be loaded from the same query using an SQL outer join.

When defining a criteria query, it is not necessary to restrict the returned entity types when creating
the Hibernate Search query from the full text session: the type is guessed from the criteria query
itself.

Important

Only fetch mode can be adjusted, refrain from applying any other restriction. While
it is known to work as of Hibernate Search 4, using restriction (ie a where clause)
on your Criteria query should be avoided when possible. getResultSize() will
throw a SearchException if used in conjunction with a Criteria with restriction.

Important

You cannot use setCriteriaQuery if more than one entity type is expected to be
returned.

5.1.3.5. Projection

For some use cases, returning the domain object (including its associations) is overkill. Only a
small subset of the properties is necessary. Hibernate Search allows you to return a subset of
properties:

Example 5.9. Using projection instead of returning the full domain object

org.hibernate.search.FullTextQuery query =
s.createFullTextQuery(luceneQuery, Book.class);
query.setProjection("id", "summary", "body", "mainAuthor.name");
List results = query.list();
Object[] firstResult = (Object[]) results.get(0);
Integer id = firstResult[0];
String summary = firstResult[1];
String body = firstResult[2];
String authorName = firstResult[3];

Hibernate Search extracts the properties from the Lucene index and convert them back to their
object representation, returning a list of Object[]. Projections avoid a potential database round
trip (useful if the query response time is critical). However, it also has several constraints:

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• the properties projected must be stored in the index (@Field(store=Store.YES)), which

increases the index size

• the properties projected must use a FieldBridge implementing

org.hibernate.search.bridge.TwoWayFieldBridge or
org.hibernate.search.bridge.TwoWayStringBridge, the latter being the simpler version.

Note
All Hibernate Search built-in types are two-way.

• you can only project simple properties of the indexed entity or its embedded associations. This
means you cannot project a whole embedded entity.

• projection does not work on collections or maps which are indexed via @IndexedEmbedded

Projection is also useful for another kind of use case. Lucene can provide metadata information
about the results. By using some special projection constants, the projection mechanism can
retrieve this metadata:

Example 5.10. Using projection in order to retrieve meta data

org.hibernate.search.FullTextQuery query =
s.createFullTextQuery(luceneQuery, Book.class);
query.setProjection(
FullTextQuery.SCORE,
FullTextQuery.THIS,
"mainAuthor.name" );
List results = query.list();
Object[] firstResult = (Object[]) results.get(0);
float score = firstResult[0];
Book book = firstResult[1];
String authorName = firstResult[2];

You can mix and match regular fields and projection constants. Here is the list of the available
constants:

• FullTextQuery.THIS: returns the initialized and managed entity (as a non projected query
would have done).

• FullTextQuery.DOCUMENT: returns the Lucene Document related to the object projected.

• FullTextQuery.OBJECT_CLASS: returns the class of the indexed entity.

• FullTextQuery.SCORE: returns the document score in the query. Scores are handy to compare
one result against an other for a given query but are useless when comparing the result of
different queries.

• FullTextQuery.ID: the id property value of the projected object.

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• FullTextQuery.DOCUMENT_ID: the Lucene document id. Careful, Lucene document id can

change overtime between two different IndexReader opening.

• FullTextQuery.EXPLANATION: returns the Lucene Explanation object for the matching object/
document in the given query. Do not use if you retrieve a lot of data. Running explanation
typically is as costly as running the whole Lucene query per matching element. Make sure you
use projection!

5.1.3.6. Customizing object initialization strategies

By default, Hibernate Search uses the most appropriate strategy to initialize entities matching your
full text query. It executes one (or several) queries to retrieve the required entities. This is the best
approach to minimize database round trips in a scenario where none / few of the retrieved entities
are present in the persistence context (ie the session) or the second level cache.

If most of your entities are present in the second level cache, you can force Hibernate Search to
look into the cache before retrieving an object from the database.

Example 5.11. Check the second-level cache before using a query

FullTextQuery query = session.createFullTextQuery(luceneQuery, User.class);

query.initializeObjectWith(
ObjectLookupMethod.SECOND_LEVEL_CACHE,
DatabaseRetrievalMethod.QUERY
);

ObjectLookupMethod defines the strategy used to check if an object is easily accessible (without
database round trip). Other options are:

• ObjectLookupMethod.PERSISTENCE_CONTEXT: useful if most of the matching entities are

already in the persistence context (ie loaded in the Session or EntityManager)

• ObjectLookupMethod.SECOND_LEVEL_CACHE: check first the persistence context and then the

second-level cache.

Note
Note that to search in the second-level cache, several settings must be in place:

• the second level cache must be properly configured and active

• the entity must have enabled second-level cache (eg via @Cacheable)

• the Session, EntityManager or Query must allow access to the second-level

cache for read access (ie CacheMode.NORMAL in Hibernate native APIs or
CacheRetrieveMode.USE in JPA 2 APIs).

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 Building a Hibernate Search query

Warning
Avoid using ObjectLookupMethod.SECOND_LEVEL_CACHE unless your second
level cache implementation is either EHCache or Infinispan; other second level
cache providers don't currently implement this operation efficiently.

You can also customize how objects are loaded from the database (if not found before). Use
DatabaseRetrievalMethod for that:

• QUERY (default): use a (set of) queries to load several objects in batch. This is usually the best
approach.

• FIND_BY_ID: load objects one by one using the Session.get or EntityManager.find semantic.
This might be useful if batch-size is set on the entity (in which case, entities will be loaded in
batch by Hibernate Core). QUERY should be preferred almost all the time.

5.1.3.7. Limiting the time of a query

You can limit the time a query takes in Hibernate Search in two ways:

• raise an exception when the limit is reached

• limit to the number of results retrieved when the time limit is raised

5.1.3.7.1. Raise an exception on time limit

You can decide to stop a query if when it takes more than a predefined amount of
time. Note that this is a best effort basis but if Hibernate Search still has significant
work to do and if we are beyond the time limit, a QueryTimeoutException will be raised
(org.hibernate.QueryTimeoutException or javax.persistence.QueryTimeoutException
depending on your programmatic API).

To define the limit when using the native Hibernate APIs, use one of the following approaches

Example 5.12. Defining a timeout in query execution

Query luceneQuery = ...;

FullTextQuery query = fullTextSession.createFullTextQuery(luceneQuery, User.class);

//define the timeout in seconds

query.setTimeout(5);

//alternatively, define the timeout in any given time unit

query.setTimeout(450, TimeUnit.MILLISECONDS);

try {
query.list();
}
catch (org.hibernate.QueryTimeoutException e) {

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//do something, too slow

}

Likewise getResultSize(), iterate() and scroll() honor the timeout but only until the end
of the method call. That simply means that the methods of Iterable or the ScrollableResults
ignore the timeout.

Note

explain() does not honor the timeout: this method is used for debug purposes
and in particular to find out why a query is slow

When using JPA, simply use the standard way of limiting query execution time.

Example 5.13. Defining a timeout in query execution

Query luceneQuery = ...;

FullTextQuery query = fullTextEM.createFullTextQuery(luceneQuery, User.class);

//define the timeout in milliseconds

query.setHint( "javax.persistence.query.timeout", 450 );

try {
query.getResultList();
}
catch (javax.persistence.QueryTimeoutException e) {
//do something, too slow
}

Important

Remember, this is a best effort approach and does not guarantee to stop exactly
on the specified timeout.

5.1.3.7.2. Limit the number of results when the time limit is reached

Alternatively, you can return the number of results which have already been fetched by the time
the limit is reached. Note that only the Lucene part of the query is influenced by this limit. It is
possible that, if you retrieve managed object, it takes longer to fetch these objects.

Warning

This approach is not compatible with the setTimeout approach.

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 Retrieving the results

To define this soft limit, use the following approach

Example 5.14. Defining a time limit in query execution

Query luceneQuery = ...;

FullTextQuery query = fullTextSession.createFullTextQuery(luceneQuery, User.class);

//define the timeout in seconds

query.limitExecutionTimeTo(500, TimeUnit.MILLISECONDS);
List results = query.list();

Likewise getResultSize(), iterate() and scroll() honor the time limit but only until the end
of the method call. That simply means that the methods of Iterable or the ScrollableResults
ignore the timeout.

You can determine if the results have been partially loaded by invoking the hasPartialResults
method.

Example 5.15. Determines when a query returns partial results

Query luceneQuery = ...;

FullTextQuery query = fullTextSession.createFullTextQuery(luceneQuery, User.class);

//define the timeout in seconds

query.limitExecutionTimeTo(500, TimeUnit.MILLISECONDS);
List results = query.list();

if ( query.hasPartialResults() ) {
displayWarningToUser();
}

If you use the JPA API, limitExecutionTimeTo and hasPartialResults are also available to
you.

5.2. Retrieving the results

Once the Hibernate Search query is built, executing it is in no way different than executing a HQL
or Criteria query. The same paradigm and object semantic applies. All the common operations
are available: list(), uniqueResult(), iterate(), scroll().

5.2.1. Performance considerations

If you expect a reasonable number of results (for example using pagination) and expect to work on
all of them, list() or uniqueResult() are recommended. list() work best if the entity batch-
size is set up properly. Note that Hibernate Search has to process all Lucene Hits elements
(within the pagination) when using list() , uniqueResult() and iterate().

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If you wish to minimize Lucene document loading, scroll() is more appropriate. Don't forget to
close the ScrollableResults object when you're done, since it keeps Lucene resources. If you
expect to use scroll, but wish to load objects in batch, you can use query.setFetchSize().
When an object is accessed, and if not already loaded, Hibernate Search will load the next
fetchSize objects in one pass.

Important

Pagination is preferred over scrolling.

5.2.2. Result size

It is sometimes useful to know the total number of matching documents:

• for the Google-like feature "1-10 of about 888,000,000"

• to implement a fast pagination navigation

• to implement a multi step search engine (adding approximation if the restricted query return no
or not enough results)

Of course it would be too costly to retrieve all the matching documents. Hibernate Search allows
you to retrieve the total number of matching documents regardless of the pagination parameters.
Even more interesting, you can retrieve the number of matching elements without triggering a
single object load.

Example 5.16. Determining the result size of a query

org.hibernate.search.FullTextQuery query =
s.createFullTextQuery(luceneQuery, Book.class);
//return the number of matching books without loading a single one
assert 3245 == query.getResultSize();

org.hibernate.search.FullTextQuery query =
s.createFullTextQuery(luceneQuery, Book.class);
query.setMaxResult(10);
List results = query.list();
//return the total number of matching books regardless of pagination
assert 3245 == query.getResultSize();

Note

Like Google, the number of results is an approximation if the index is not fully up-
to-date with the database (asynchronous cluster for example).

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 ResultTransformer

5.2.3. ResultTransformer
As seen in Section 5.1.3.5, “Projection” projection results are returns as Object arrays. This data
structure is not always matching the application needs. In this cases It is possible to apply a
ResultTransformer which post query execution can build the needed data structure:

Example 5.17. Using ResultTransformer in conjunction with projections

org.hibernate.search.FullTextQuery query =
s.createFullTextQuery(luceneQuery, Book.class);
query.setProjection("title", "mainAuthor.name");
query.setResultTransformer(
new StaticAliasToBeanResultTransformer(
BookView.class,
"title",
"author" )
);
List<BookView> results = (List<BookView>) query.list();
for (BookView view : results) {
log.info("Book: " + view.getTitle() + ", " + view.getAuthor());
}

Examples of ResultTransformer implementations can be found in the Hibernate Core codebase.

5.2.4. Understanding results

You will find yourself sometimes puzzled by a result showing up in a query or a result not showing
up in a query. Luke is a great tool to understand those mysteries. However, Hibernate Search
also gives you access to the Lucene Explanation object for a given result (in a given query). This
class is considered fairly advanced to Lucene users but can provide a good understanding of the
scoring of an object. You have two ways to access the Explanation object for a given result:

• Use the fullTextQuery.explain(int) method

• Use projection

The first approach takes a document id as a parameter and return the Explanation object. The
document id can be retrieved using projection and the FullTextQuery.DOCUMENT_ID constant.

Warning

The Document id has nothing to do with the entity id. Do not mess up these two
notions.

In the second approach you project the Explanation object using the
FullTextQuery.EXPLANATION constant.

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Example 5.18. Retrieving the Lucene Explanation object using projection

FullTextQuery ftQuery = s.createFullTextQuery( luceneQuery, Dvd.class )

.setProjection(
FullTextQuery.DOCUMENT_ID,
FullTextQuery.EXPLANATION,
FullTextQuery.THIS );
@SuppressWarnings("unchecked") List<Object[]> results = ftQuery.list();
for (Object[] result : results) {
Explanation e = (Explanation) result[1];
display( e.toString() );
}

Be careful, building the explanation object is quite expensive, it is roughly as expensive as running
the Lucene query again. Don't do it if you don't need the object

5.3. Filters
Apache Lucene has a powerful feature that allows to filter query results according to a custom
filtering process. This is a very powerful way to apply additional data restrictions, especially since
filters can be cached and reused. Some interesting use cases are:

• security

• temporal data (eg. view only last month's data)

• population filter (eg. search limited to a given category)

• and many more

Hibernate Search pushes the concept further by introducing the notion of parameterizable named
filters which are transparently cached. For people familiar with the notion of Hibernate Core filters,
the API is very similar:

Example 5.19. Enabling fulltext filters for a given query

fullTextQuery = s.createFullTextQuery(query, Driver.class);

fullTextQuery.enableFullTextFilter("bestDriver");
fullTextQuery.enableFullTextFilter("security").setParameter("login", "andre");
fullTextQuery.list(); //returns only best drivers where andre has credentials

In this example we enabled two filters on top of the query. You can enable (or disable) as many
filters as you like.

Declaring filters is done through the @FullTextFilterDef annotation. This annotation can be on
any @Indexed entity regardless of the query the filter is later applied to. This implies that filter

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 Filters

definitions are global and their names must be unique. A SearchException is thrown in case two
different @FullTextFilterDef annotations with the same name are defined. Each named filter
has to specify its actual filter implementation.

Example 5.20. Defining and implementing a Filter

@Entity
@Indexed
@FullTextFilterDefs( {
@FullTextFilterDef(name = "bestDriver", impl = BestDriversFilter.class),
@FullTextFilterDef(name = "security", impl = SecurityFilterFactory.class)
})
public class Driver { ... }

public class BestDriversFilter extends org.apache.lucene.search.Filter {

public DocIdSet getDocIdSet(IndexReader reader) throws IOException {

OpenBitSet bitSet = new OpenBitSet( reader.maxDoc() );
TermDocs termDocs = reader.termDocs( new Term( "score", "5" ) );
while ( termDocs.next() ) {
bitSet.set( termDocs.doc() );
}
return bitSet;
}
}

BestDriversFilter is an example of a simple Lucene filter which reduces the result

set to drivers whose score is 5. In this example the specified filter implements the
org.apache.lucene.search.Filter directly and contains a no-arg constructor.

If your Filter creation requires additional steps or if the filter you want to use does not have a no-
arg constructor, you can use the factory pattern:

Example 5.21. Creating a filter using the factory pattern

@Entity
@Indexed
@FullTextFilterDef(name = "bestDriver", impl = BestDriversFilterFactory.class)
public class Driver { ... }

public class BestDriversFilterFactory {

@Factory
public Filter getFilter() {
//some additional steps to cache the filter results per IndexReader
Filter bestDriversFilter = new BestDriversFilter();
return new CachingWrapperFilter(bestDriversFilter);
}
}

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Hibernate Search will look for a @Factory annotated method and use it to build the filter instance.
The factory must have a no-arg constructor.

Named filters come in handy where parameters have to be passed to the filter. For example a
security filter might want to know which security level you want to apply:

Example 5.22. Passing parameters to a defined filter

fullTextQuery = s.createFullTextQuery(query, Driver.class);

fullTextQuery.enableFullTextFilter("security").setParameter("level", 5);

Each parameter name should have an associated setter on either the filter or filter factory of the
targeted named filter definition.

Example 5.23. Using parameters in the actual filter implementation

public class SecurityFilterFactory {

private Integer level;

/**
* injected parameter
*/
public void setLevel(Integer level) {
this.level = level;
}

@Key
public FilterKey getKey() {
StandardFilterKey key = new StandardFilterKey();
key.addParameter( level );
return key;
}

@Factory
public Filter getFilter() {
Query query = new TermQuery( new Term("level", level.toString() ) );
return new CachingWrapperFilter( new QueryWrapperFilter(query) );
}
}

Note the method annotated @Key returning a FilterKey object. The returned object has a special
contract: the key object must implement equals() / hashCode() so that 2 keys are equal if and
only if the given Filter types are the same and the set of parameters are the same. In other
words, 2 filter keys are equal if and only if the filters from which the keys are generated can be
interchanged. The key object is used as a key in the cache mechanism.

@Key methods are needed only if:

• you enabled the filter caching system (enabled by default)

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 Filters

• your filter has parameters

In most cases, using the StandardFilterKey implementation will be good enough. It delegates
the equals() / hashCode() implementation to each of the parameters equals and hashcode
methods.

As mentioned before the defined filters are per default cached and the cache uses a combination
of hard and soft references to allow disposal of memory when needed. The hard reference
cache keeps track of the most recently used filters and transforms the ones least used to
SoftReferences when needed. Once the limit of the hard reference cache is reached additional
filters are cached as SoftReferences. To adjust the size of the hard reference cache, use
hibernate.search.filter.cache_strategy.size (defaults to 128). For advanced use of filter
caching, you can implement your own FilterCachingStrategy. The classname is defined by
hibernate.search.filter.cache_strategy.

This filter caching mechanism should not be confused with caching the actual filter
results. In Lucene it is common practice to wrap filters using the IndexReader around
a CachingWrapperFilter. The wrapper will cache the DocIdSet returned from the
getDocIdSet(IndexReader reader) method to avoid expensive recomputation. It is important
to mention that the computed DocIdSet is only cachable for the same IndexReader instance,
because the reader effectively represents the state of the index at the moment it was opened.
The document list cannot change within an opened IndexReader. A different/new IndexReader
instance, however, works potentially on a different set of Documents (either from a different index
or simply because the index has changed), hence the cached DocIdSet has to be recomputed.

Hibernate Search also helps with this aspect of caching. Per default the cache flag of
@FullTextFilterDef is set to FilterCacheModeType.INSTANCE_AND_DOCIDSETRESULTS which
will automatically cache the filter instance as well as wrap the specified filter around
a Hibernate specific implementation of CachingWrapperFilter. In contrast to Lucene's
version of this class SoftReferences are used together with a hard reference count
(see discussion about filter cache). The hard reference count can be adjusted using
hibernate.search.filter.cache_docidresults.size (defaults to 5). The wrapping behaviour
can be controlled using the @FullTextFilterDef.cache parameter. There are three different
values for this parameter:

Value Definition
FilterCacheModeType.NONE No filter instance and no result is cached by
Hibernate Search. For every filter call, a new
filter instance is created. This setting might
be useful for rapidly changing data sets or
heavily memory constrained environments.
FilterCacheModeType.INSTANCE_ONLY The filter instance is cached and reused
across concurrent Filter.getDocIdSet()
calls. DocIdSet results are not cached. This
setting is useful when a filter uses its own
specific caching mechanism or the filter

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Value Definition
results change dynamically due to application
specific events making DocIdSet caching in
both cases unnecessary.
FilterCacheModeType.INSTANCE_AND_DOCIDSETRESULTS
Both the filter instance and the DocIdSet
results are cached. This is the default value.

Last but not least - why should filters be cached? There are two areas where filter caching shines:

• the system does not update the targeted entity index often (in other words, the IndexReader
is reused a lot)

• the Filter's DocIdSet is expensive to compute (compared to the time spent to execute the query)

5.3.1. Using filters in a sharded environment

It is possible, in a sharded environment to execute queries on a subset of the available shards.
This can be done in two steps:

• create a sharding strategy that does select a subset of IndexManagers depending on some
filter configuration

• activate the proper filter at query time

Let's first look at an example of sharding strategy that query on a specific customer shard if the
customer filter is activated.

public class CustomerShardingStrategy implements IndexShardingStrategy {

// stored IndexManagers in a array indexed by customerID

private IndexManager[] indexManagers;

public void initialize(Properties properties, IndexManager[] indexManagers) {

this.indexManagers = indexManagers;
}

public IndexManager[] getIndexManagersForAllShards() {

return indexManagers;
}

public IndexManager getIndexManagerForAddition(

Class<?> entity, Serializable id, String idInString, Document document) {
Integer customerID = Integer.parseInt(document.getFieldable("customerID").stringValue());
return indexManagers[customerID];
}

public IndexManager[] getIndexManagersForDeletion(

Class<?> entity, Serializable id, String idInString) {
return getIndexManagersForAllShards();
}

/**
* Optimization; don't search ALL shards and union the results; in this case, we

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 Faceting

* can be certain that all the data for a particular customer Filter is in a single
* shard; simply return that shard by customerID.
*/
public IndexManager[] getIndexManagersForQuery(
FullTextFilterImplementor[] filters) {
FullTextFilter filter = getCustomerFilter(filters, "customer");
if (filter == null) {
return getIndexManagersForAllShards();
}
else {
return new IndexManager[] { indexManagers[Integer.parseInt(
filter.getParameter("customerID").toString())] };
}
}

private FullTextFilter getCustomerFilter(FullTextFilterImplementor[] filters, String name) {

for (FullTextFilterImplementor filter: filters) {
if (filter.getName().equals(name)) return filter;
}
return null;
}
}

In this example, if the filter named customer is present, we make sure to only use the shard
dedicated to this customer. Otherwise, we return all shards. A given Sharding strategy can react
to one or more filters and depends on their parameters.

The second step is simply to activate the filter at query time. While the filter can be a regular filter
(as defined in Section 5.3, “Filters”) which also filters Lucene results after the query, you can make
use of a special filter that will only be passed to the sharding strategy and otherwise ignored for the
rest of the query. Simply use the ShardSensitiveOnlyFilter class when declaring your filter.

@Entity @Indexed
@FullTextFilterDef(name="customer", impl=ShardSensitiveOnlyFilter.class)
public class Customer {
...
}

FullTextQuery query = ftEm.createFullTextQuery(luceneQuery, Customer.class);

query.enableFulltextFilter("customer").setParameter("CustomerID", 5);
@SuppressWarnings("unchecked")
List<Customer> results = query.getResultList();

Note that by using the ShardSensitiveOnlyFilter, you do not have to implement any Lucene
filter. Using filters and sharding strategy reacting to these filters is recommended to speed up
queries in a sharded environment.

5.4. Faceting
Faceted search [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Faceted_search] is a technique which allows to divide
the results of a query into multiple categories. This categorization includes the calculation of hit

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counts for each category and the ability to further restrict search results based on these facets
(categories). Example 5.24, “Search for 'Hibernate Search' on Amazon” shows a faceting example.
The search for 'Hibernate Search' results in fifteen hits which are displayed on the main part of
the page. The navigation bar on the left, however, shows the category Computers & Internet with
its subcategories Programming, Computer Science, Databases, Software, Web Development,
Networking and Home Computing. For each of these subcategories the number of books is shown
matching the main search criteria and belonging to the respective subcategory. This division of
the category Computers & Internet is one facet of this search. Another one is for example the
average customer review rating.

Example 5.24. Search for 'Hibernate Search' on Amazon

In Hibernate Search the classes QueryBuilder and FullTextQuery are the entry point to the
faceting API. The former allows to create faceting requests whereas the latter gives access to the
so called FacetManager. With the help of the FacetManager faceting requests can be applied on

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 Creating a faceting request

a query and selected facets can be added to an existing query in order to refine search results.
The following sections will describe the faceting process in more detail. The examples will use the
entity Cd as shown in Example 5.25, “Example entity for faceting”:

Example 5.25. Example entity for faceting

@Entity
@Indexed
public class Cd {

@Id
@GeneratedValue
private int id;

@Fields( {
@Field,
@Field(name = "name_un_analyzed", analyze = Analyze.NO)
})
private String name;

@Field(analyze = Analyze.NO)
private int price;

Field(analyze = Analyze.NO)
@DateBridge(resolution = Resolution.YEAR)
private Date releaseYear;

@Field(analyze = Analyze.NO)
private String label;

// setter/getter
...

5.4.1. Creating a faceting request

The first step towards a faceted search is to create the FacetingRequest. Currently two types
of faceting requests are supported. The first type is called discrete faceting and the second type
range faceting request.

5.4.1.1. Discrete faceting request

In the case of a discrete faceting request you start with giving the request a unique name. This
name will later be used to retrieve the facet values (see Section 5.4.4, “Interpreting a Facet result”).
Then you need to specify on which index field you want to categorize on and which faceting options
to apply. An example for a discrete faceting request can be seen in Example 5.26, “Creating a
discrete faceting request”:

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Chapter 5. Querying

Example 5.26. Creating a discrete faceting request

QueryBuilder builder = fullTextSession.getSearchFactory()

.buildQueryBuilder()
.forEntity(Cd.class)
.get();
FacetingRequest labelFacetingRequest = builder.facet()
.name("labelFacetRequest")
.onField("label")
.discrete()
.orderedBy(FacetSortOrder.COUNT_DESC)
.includeZeroCounts(false)
.maxFacetCount(3)
.createFacetingRequest();

When executing this faceting request a Facet instance will be created for each discrete value
for the indexed field label. The Facet instance will record the actual field value including how
often this particular field value occurs within the original query results. Parameters orderedBy,
includeZeroCounts and maxFacetCount are optional and can be applied on any faceting request.
Parameter orderedBy allows to specify in which order the created facets will be returned. The
default is FacetSortOrder.COUNT_DESC, but you can also sort on the field value. Parameter
includeZeroCount determines whether facets with a count of 0 will be included in the result (by
default they are) and maxFacetCount allows to limit the maximum amount of facets returned.

Note

There are several preconditions an indexed field has to meet in order to categorize
(facet) on it. The indexed property must be of type String, Date or a subtype of
Number; also null values should be avoided. Finally the property has to be indexed
with Analyze.NO and you can not use it in combination with @NumericField. When
you need these other options we suggest to index the property twice and use the
appropriate field depending on the use case:

...
@Fields({
@Field( name="price" ),
@Field( name="price_facet", analyze=Analyze.NO )
})
@NumericFields({
@NumericField( forField="price" )
})
private int price;
...

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 Setting the facet sort order

5.4.1.2. Creating a range faceting request

The creation of a range faceting request is similar. We also start with a name for the request and
the field to facet on. Then we have to specify ranges for the field values. A range faceting request
can be seen in Example 5.27, “Creating a range faceting request”. There, three different price
ranges are specified. below and above can only be specified once, but you can specify as many
from - to ranges as you want. For each range boundary you can also specify via excludeLimit
whether it is included into the range or not.

Example 5.27. Creating a range faceting request

QueryBuilder builder = fullTextSession.getSearchFactory()

.buildQueryBuilder()
.forEntity(Cd.class)
.get();
FacetingRequest priceFacetingRequest = builder.facet()
.name("priceFaceting")
.onField("price_facet")
.range()
.below(1000)
.from(1001).to(1500)
.above(1500).excludeLimit()
.createFacetingRequest();

5.4.2. Setting the facet sort order

The result of applying a faceting request is a list of Facet instances as seen in Example 5.28,
“Applying a faceting request”. The order within the list is given by the FacetSortOrder
parameter specified via orderedBy when creating the faceting request. The default value is
FacetSortOrder.COUNT_DESC, meaning facets are ordered by their count in descending order
(highest count first). Other values are COUNT_ASC, FIELD_VALUE and RANGE_DEFINITION_ORDER.
COUNT_ASC returns the facets in ascending count order whereas FIELD_VALUE will return them in
alphabetical order of the facet/category value (see Section 5.4.4, “Interpreting a Facet result”).
RANGE_DEFINITION_ORDER only applies for range faceting request and returns the facets in the
same order in which the ranges are defined. For Example 5.27, “Creating a range faceting request”
this would mean the facet for the range of below 1000 would be returned first, followed by the
facet for the range 1001 to 1500 and finally the facet for above 1500.

5.4.3. Applying a faceting request

In Section 5.4.1, “Creating a faceting request” we have seen how to create a faceting request.
Now it is time to apply it on a query. The key is the FacetManager which can be retrieved via the
FullTextQuery (see Example 5.28, “Applying a faceting request”).

Example 5.28. Applying a faceting request

// create a fulltext query

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Chapter 5. Querying

Query luceneQuery = builder.all().createQuery(); // match all query

FullTextQuery fullTextQuery = fullTextSession.createFullTextQuery(luceneQuery, Cd.class);

// retrieve facet manager and apply faceting request

FacetManager facetManager = fullTextQuery.getFacetManager();
facetManager.enableFaceting(priceFacetingRequest);

// get the list of Cds

List<Cd> cds = fullTextQuery.list();
...

// retrieve the faceting results

List<Facet> facets = facetManager.getFacets("priceFaceting");
...

You need to enable the faceting request before you execute the query. You do that via
facetManager.enableFaceting(<facetName>). You can enable as many faceting requests
as you like, then you execute the query and retrieve the facet results for a given request via
facetManager.getFacets(<facetname>). For each request you will get a list of Facet instances.
Facet requests stay active and get applied to the fulltext query until they are either explicitly
disabled via disableFaceting(<facetName>) or the query is discarded.

5.4.4. Interpreting a Facet result

Each facet request results in a list of Facet instances. Each instance represents one facet/
category value. In the CD example (Example 5.26, “Creating a discrete faceting request”) where
we want to categorize on the Cd labels, there would for example be a Facet for each of the record
labels Universal, Sony and Warner. Example 5.29, “Facet API” shows the API of Facet.

Example 5.29. Facet API

public interface Facet {

/**
* @return the faceting name this {@code Facet} belongs to.
*
* @see org.hibernate.search.query.facet.FacetingRequest#getFacetingName()
*/
String getFacetingName();

/**
* Return the {@code Document} field name this facet is targeting.
* The field needs to be indexed with {@code Analyze.NO}.
*
* @return the {@code Document} field name this facet is targeting.
*/
String getFieldName();

/**
* @return the value of this facet. In case of a discrete facet it is the actual
* {@code Document} field value. In case of a range query the value is a
* string representation of the range.
*/
String getValue();

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 Restricting query results

/**
* @return the facet count.
*/
int getCount();

/**
* @return a Lucene {@link Query} which can be executed to retrieve all
* documents matching the value of this facet.
*/
Query getFacetQuery();
}

getFacetingName() and getFieldName() are returning the facet request name and the targeted
document field name as specified by the underlying FacetRequest. For Example 5.26, “Creating
a discrete faceting request” that would be labelFacetRequest and label respectively. The
interesting information is provided by getValue() and getCount(). The former is the actual facet/
category value, for example a concrete record label like Universal. The latter returns the count for
this value. To stick with the example again, the count value tells you how many Cds are released
under the Universal label. Last but not least, getFacetQuery() returns a Lucene query which can
be used to retrieve the entities counted in this facet.

5.4.5. Restricting query results

A common use case for faceting is a "drill-down" functionality which allows you to narrow your
original search by applying a given facet on it. To do this, you can apply any of the returned Facets
as additional criteria on your original query via FacetSelection. FacetSelections are available
via the FacetManager and allow you to select a facet as query criteria (selectFacets), remove
a facet restriction (deselectFacets), remove all facet restrictions (clearSelectedFacets) and
retrieve all currently selected facets (getSelectedFacets). Example 5.30, “Restricting query
results via the application of a FacetSelection” shows an example.

Example 5.30. Restricting query results via the application of a FacetSelection

// create a fulltext query

Query luceneQuery = builder.all().createQuery(); // match all query
FullTextQuery fullTextQuery = fullTextSession.createFullTextQuery( luceneQuery, clazz );

// retrieve facet manager and apply faceting request

FacetManager facetManager = fullTextQuery.getFacetManager();
facetManager.enableFaceting( priceFacetingRequest );

// get the list of Cd

List<Cd> cds = fullTextQuery.list();
assertTrue(cds.size() == 10);

// retrieve the faceting results

List<Facet> facets = facetManager.getFacets( "priceFaceting" );
assertTrue(facets.get(0).getCount() == 2)

// apply first facet as additional search criteria

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FacetSelection facetSelection = facetManager.getFacetGroup( "priceFaceting" );

facetSelection.selectFacets( facets.get( 0 ) );

// re-execute the query

cds = fullTextQuery.list();
assertTrue(cds.size() == 2);

5.5. Optimizing the query process

Query performance depends on several criteria:

• the Lucene query itself: read the literature on this subject.

• the number of loaded objects: use pagination and / or index projection (if needed).

• the way Hibernate Search interacts with the Lucene readers: defines the appropriate Reader
strategy.

• caching frequently extracted values from the index: see Section 5.5.1, “Caching index values:
FieldCache”.

5.5.1. Caching index values: FieldCache

The primary function of a Lucene index is to identify matches to your queries, still after the query is
performed the results must be analyzed to extract useful information: typically Hibernate Search
might need to extract the Class type and the primary key.

Extracting the needed values from the index has a performance cost, which in some cases might
be very low and not noticeable, but in some other cases might be a good candidate for caching.

What is exactly needed depends on the kind of Projections being used (see Section 5.1.3.5,
“Projection”), and in some cases the Class type is not needed as it can be inferred from the query
context or other means.

Using the @CacheFromIndex annotation you can experiment different kinds of caching of the
main metadata fields required by Hibernate Search:

import static org.hibernate.search.annotations.FieldCacheType.CLASS;

import static org.hibernate.search.annotations.FieldCacheType.ID;

@Indexed
@CacheFromIndex( { CLASS, ID } )
public class Essay {
...

It is currently possible to cache Class types and IDs using this annotation:

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 Caching index values: FieldCache

• CLASS: Hibernate Search will use a Lucene FieldCache to improve peformance of the Class
type extraction from the index.

This value is enabled by default, and is what Hibernate Search will apply if you don't specify
the @CacheFromIndex annotation.

• ID: Extracting the primary identifier will use a cache. This is likely providing the best performing
queries, but will consume much more memory which in turn might reduce performance.

Note

Measure the performance and memory consumption impact after warmup

(executing some queries): enabling Field Caches is likely to improve performance
but this is not always the case.

Using a FieldCache has two downsides to consider:

• Memory usage: these caches can be quite memory hungry. Typically the CLASS cache has
lower requirements than the ID cache.

• Index warmup: when using field caches, the first query on a new index or segment will be slower
than when you don't have caching enabled.

With some queries the classtype won't be needed at all, in that case even if you enabled the CLASS
field cache, this might not be used; for example if you are targeting a single class, obviously all
returned values will be of that type (this is evaluated at each Query execution).

For the ID FieldCache to be used, the ids of targeted entities must be using a TwoWayFieldBridge
(as all builting bridges), and all types being loaded in a specific query must use the fieldname for
the id, and have ids of the same type (this is evaluated at each Query execution).

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Chapter 6.

Manual index changes

As Hibernate core applies changes to the Database, Hibernate Search detects these changes and
will update the index automatically (unless the EventListeners are disabled). Sometimes changes
are made to the database without using Hibernate, as when backup is restored or your data is
otherwise affected; for these cases Hibernate Search exposes the Manual Index APIs to explicitly
update or remove a single entity from the index, or rebuild the index for the whole database, or
remove all references to a specific type.

All these methods affect the Lucene Index only, no changes are applied to the Database.

6.1. Adding instances to the index

Using FullTextSession.index(T entity) you can directly add or update a specific object
instance to the index. If this entity was already indexed, then the index will be updated. Changes
to the index are only applied at transaction commit.

Example 6.1. Indexing an entity via FullTextSession.index(T entity)

FullTextSession fullTextSession = Search.getFullTextSession(session);

Transaction tx = fullTextSession.beginTransaction();
Object customer = fullTextSession.load( Customer.class, 8 );
fullTextSession.index(customer);
tx.commit(); //index only updated at commit time

In case you want to add all instances for a type, or for all indexed types, the recommended
approach is to use a MassIndexer: see Section 6.3.2, “Using a MassIndexer” for more details.

The method FullTextSession.index(T entity) is considered an explicit indexing operation, so

any registered EntityIndexingInterceptor won't be applied in this case. For more information
on EntityIndexingInterceptor see Section 4.5, “Conditional indexing: to index or not based
on entity state”.

6.2. Deleting instances from the index

It is equally possible to remove an entity or all entities of a given type from a Lucene index without
the need to physically remove them from the database. This operation is named purging and is
also done through the FullTextSession.

Example 6.2. Purging a specific instance of an entity from the index

FullTextSession fullTextSession = Search.getFullTextSession(session);

Transaction tx = fullTextSession.beginTransaction();
for (Customer customer : customers) {
fullTextSession.purge( Customer.class, customer.getId() );

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Chapter 6. Manual index changes

}
tx.commit(); //index is updated at commit time

Purging will remove the entity with the given id from the Lucene index but will not touch the
database.

If you need to remove all entities of a given type, you can use the purgeAll method. This operation
removes all entities of the type passed as a parameter as well as all its subtypes.

Example 6.3. Purging all instances of an entity from the index

FullTextSession fullTextSession = Search.getFullTextSession(session);

Transaction tx = fullTextSession.beginTransaction();
fullTextSession.purgeAll( Customer.class );
//optionally optimize the index
//fullTextSession.getSearchFactory().optimize( Customer.class );
tx.commit(); //index changes are applied at commit time

As in the previous example, it is suggested to optimize the index after many purge operation to
actually free the used space.

As is the case with method FullTextSession.index(T entity), also purge and purgeAll are
considered explicit indexinging operations: any registered EntityIndexingInterceptor won't
be applied. For more information on EntityIndexingInterceptor see Section 4.5, “Conditional
indexing: to index or not based on entity state”.

Note

Methods index, purge and purgeAll are available on FullTextEntityManager

as well.

Note

All manual indexing methods (index, purge and purgeAll) only affect the index,
not the database, nevertheless they are transactional and as such they won't
be applied until the transaction is successfully committed, or you make use of
flushToIndexes.

6.3. Rebuilding the whole index

If you change the entity mapping to the index, chances are that the whole Index needs to be
updated; For example if you decide to index a an existing field using a different analyzer you'll
need to rebuild the index for affected types. Also if the Database is replaced (like restored from a

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 Using flushToIndexes()

backup, imported from a legacy system) you'll want to be able to rebuild the index from existing
data. Hibernate Search provides two main strategies to choose from:

• Using FullTextSession.flushToIndexes() periodically, while using

FullTextSession.index() on all entities.

• Use a MassIndexer.

6.3.1. Using flushToIndexes()

This strategy consists in removing the existing index and then adding all entities back to the
index using FullTextSession.purgeAll() and FullTextSession.index(), however there are
some memory and efficiency contraints. For maximum efficiency Hibernate Search batches index
operations and executes them at commit time. If you expect to index a lot of data you need
to be careful about memory consumption since all documents are kept in a queue until the
transaction commit. You can potentially face an OutOfMemoryException if you don't empty the
queue periodically: to do this you can use fullTextSession.flushToIndexes(). Every time
fullTextSession.flushToIndexes() is called (or if the transaction is committed), the batch
queue is processed applying all index changes. Be aware that, once flushed, the changes cannot
be rolled back.

Example 6.4. Index rebuilding using index() and flushToIndexes()

fullTextSession.setFlushMode(FlushMode.MANUAL);
fullTextSession.setCacheMode(CacheMode.IGNORE);
transaction = fullTextSession.beginTransaction();
//Scrollable results will avoid loading too many objects in memory
ScrollableResults results = fullTextSession.createCriteria( Email.class )
.setFetchSize(BATCH_SIZE)
.scroll( ScrollMode.FORWARD_ONLY );
int index = 0;
while( results.next() ) {
index++;
fullTextSession.index( results.get(0) ); //index each element
if (index % BATCH_SIZE == 0) {
fullTextSession.flushToIndexes(); //apply changes to indexes
fullTextSession.clear(); //free memory since the queue is processed
}
}
transaction.commit();

Try to use a batch size that guarantees that your application will not run out of memory: with a
bigger batch size objects are fetched faster from database but more memory is needed.

6.3.2. Using a MassIndexer

Hibernate Search's MassIndexer uses several parallel threads to rebuild the index; you can
optionally select which entities need to be reloaded or have it reindex all entities. This approach is

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optimized for best performance but requires to set the application in maintenance mode: making
queries to the index is not recommended when a MassIndexer is busy.

Example 6.5. Index rebuilding using a MassIndexer

fullTextSession.createIndexer().startAndWait();

This will rebuild the index, deleting it and then reloading all entities from the database. Although
it's simple to use, some tweaking is recommended to speed up the process: there are several
parameters configurable.

Warning

During the progress of a MassIndexer the content of the index is undefined! If a

query is performed while the MassIndexer is working most likely some results will
be missing.

Example 6.6. Using a tuned MassIndexer

fullTextSession
.createIndexer( User.class )
.batchSizeToLoadObjects( 25 )
.cacheMode( CacheMode.NORMAL )
.threadsToLoadObjects( 12 )
.idFetchSize( 150 )
.progressMonitor( monitor ) //a MassIndexerProgressMonitor implementation
.startAndWait();

This will rebuild the index of all User instances (and subtypes), and will create 12 parallel threads
to load the User instances using batches of 25 objects per query; these same 12 threads will
also need to process indexed embedded relations and custom FieldBridges or ClassBridges,
to finally output a Lucene document. In this conversion process these threads are likely going to
need to trigger lazyloading of additional attributes, so you will probably need a high number of
threads working in parallel. The number of threads working on actual index writing is defined by
the backend configuration of each index. See the option worker.thread_pool.size in Table 3.3,
“Execution configuration”.

As of Hibernate Search 4.4.0, instead of indexing all the types in parallel, the MassIndexer is
configured by default to index only one type in parallel. It prevents resource exhaustion especially
database connections and usually does not slow down the indexing. You can however configure
this behavior using MassIndexer.typesToIndexInParallel(int threadsToIndexObjects):

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 Using a MassIndexer

Example 6.7. Configuring the MassIndexer to index several types in parallel

fullTextSession
.createIndexer( User.class, Customer.class )
.typesToIndexInParallel( 2 )
.batchSizeToLoadObjects( 25 )
.cacheMode( CacheMode.NORMAL )
.threadsToLoadObjects( 5 )
.idFetchSize( 150 )
.progressMonitor( monitor ) //a MassIndexerProgressMonitor implementation
.startAndWait();

Generally we suggest to leave cacheMode to CacheMode.IGNORE (the default), as in most

reindexing situations the cache will be a useless additional overhead; it might be useful to enable
some other CacheMode depending on your data: it could increase performance if the main entity
is relating to enum-like data included in the index.

Note

The MassIndexer was designed for speed and is unaware of transactions, so there
is no need to begin one or committing. Also because it is not transactional it is not
recommended to let users use the system during its processing, as it is unlikely
people will be able to find results and the system load might be too high anyway.

6.3.2.1. MassIndexer using threads and JDBC connections

The MassIndexer was designed to finish the reindexing task as quickly as possible, but this
requires a bit of care in its configuration to behave fairly with your server resources.

There is a simple formula to understand how the different options applied to the MassIndexer affect
the number of used worker threads and connections: each thread will require a JDBC connection.

threads = typesToIndexInParallel * (threadsToLoadObjects + 1);

required JDBC connections = threads;

Let's see some suggestions for a roughly sane tuning starting point:

1. Option typesToIndexInParallel should probably be a low value, like 1 or 2, depending on

how much of your CPUs have spare cycles and how slow a database round trip will be.

2. Before tuning a parallel run, experiment with options to tune your primary indexed entities in
isolation.

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3. Making threadsToLoadObjects higher increases the preloading rate for the picked entities
from the database, but also increases memory usage and the pressure on the threads working
on subsequent indexing.

4. Increasing parallelism usually helps as the bottleneck usually is the latency to the database
connection: it's probably worth it to experiment with values significantly higher than the number
of actual cores available, but make sure your database can handle all the multiple requests.

5. This advice might not apply to you: always measure the effects! We're providing this as a means
to help you understand how these options are related.

Warning

Running the MassIndexer with many threads will require many connections to the
database. If you don't have a sufficiently large connection pool, the MassIndexer
itself and/or your other applications could starve being unable to serve other
requests: make sure you size your connection pool accordingly to the options as
explained in the above paragraph.

Tip

The "sweet spot" of number of threads to achieve best performance is highly

dependent on your overall architecture, database design and even data values. All
internal thread groups have meaningful names so they should be easily identified
with most diagnostic tools, including simply threaddumps.

6.3.2.2. Using a custom MassIndexer implementation

The provided MassIndexer is quite general purpose, and while we believe it's a robust approach,
you might be able to squeeze some better performance by writing a custom implementation. To
run your own MassIndexer instead of using the one shipped with Hibernate Search you have to:

1. create an implementation of the org.hibernate.search.spi.MassIndexerFactory

interface;

2. set the property hibernate.search.massindexer.factoryclass with the qualified class

name of the factory implementation.

Example 6.8. Custom MassIndexerFactory example

package org.myproject
import org.hibernate.search.spi.MassIndexerFactory
[...]

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 Useful parameters for batch indexing

public class CustomIndexerFactory implements MassIndexerFactory {

public void initialize(Properties properties) {

}

public MassIndexer createMassIndexer(...) {

return new CustomIndexer();
}

hibernate.search.massindexer.factoryclass = org.myproject.CustomIndexerFactory

6.3.3. Useful parameters for batch indexing

Other parameters which affect indexing time and memory consumption are:

• hibernate.search.[default|<indexname>].exclusive_index_use

• hibernate.search.[default|<indexname>].indexwriter.max_buffered_docs

• hibernate.search.[default|<indexname>].indexwriter.max_merge_docs

• hibernate.search.[default|<indexname>].indexwriter.merge_factor

• hibernate.search.[default|<indexname>].indexwriter.merge_min_size

• hibernate.search.[default|<indexname>].indexwriter.merge_max_size

• hibernate.search.[default|<indexname>].indexwriter.merge_max_optimize_size

• hibernate.search.[default|
<indexname>].indexwriter.merge_calibrate_by_deletes

• hibernate.search.[default|<indexname>].indexwriter.ram_buffer_size

• hibernate.search.[default|<indexname>].indexwriter.term_index_interval

Previous versions also had a max_field_length but this was removed from Lucene, it's possible
to obtain a similar effect by using a LimitTokenCountAnalyzer.

All .indexwriter parameters are Lucene specific and Hibernate Search is just passing these
parameters through - see Section 3.7.1, “Tuning indexing performance” for more details.

The MassIndexer uses a forward only scrollable result to iterate on the primary keys to be
loaded, but MySQL's JDBC driver will load all values in memory; to avoid this "optimisation" set
idFetchSize to Integer.MIN_VALUE.

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Chapter 7.

Index Optimization
This section explains some low level tricks to keep your indexes at peak performance. We cover
some Lucene details which in most cases you don't have to know about: Hibernate Search will
handle these operations optimally and transparently in most cases without the need for further
configuration. Still, it is good to know that there are ways to configure the behaviour, if the need
arises.

The index is physically stored in several smaller segments. Each segment is immutable and
represents a generation of index writes. Index segments are periodically compacted, both to
merge smaller segments and to remove stale entries; this merging process happens constantly
in the background and can be tuned with the options specified in Section 3.7.1, “Tuning indexing
performance”, but you can also define policies to fully run index optimizations when it is most
suited for your specific workload.

With older versions of Lucene it was important to frequently optimize the index to maintain
good performance, but with current Lucene versions this doesn't apply anymore. The benefit of
explicit optimization is very low, and in certain cases even counter-productive. During an explicit
optimization the whole index is processed and rewritten inflicting a significant performance cost.
Optimization is for this reason a double-edged sword.

Another reason to avoid optimizing the index too often is that an optimization will, as a side effect,
invalidate cached filters and field caches and internal buffers need to be refreshed.

Tip

Optimizing the index is often not needed, does not benefit write (update)
performance at all, and is a slow operation: make sure you need it before activating
it.

Of course optimizing the index does not only present drawbacks: after the optimization process
is completed and new IndexReader instances have loaded their buffers, queries will perform at
peak performance and you will have reclaimed all disk space potentially used by stale entries.

It is recommended to not schedule any optimization, but if you wish to perform it periodically you
should run it:

• on an idle system or when the searches are less frequent

• after a lot of index modifications

When using a MassIndexer (see Section 6.3.2, “Using a MassIndexer”) it will optimize involved
indexes by default at the start and at the end of processing; you can change this behavior
by using MassIndexer.optimizeAfterPurge and MassIndexer.optimizeOnFinish respectively.

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Chapter 7. Index Optimization

The initial optimization is actually very cheap as it is performed on an emtpy index: its purpose is
to release the storage space occupied by the old index.

7.1. Automatic optimization

While in most cases this is not needed, Hibernate Search can automatically optimize an index
after:

• a certain amount of write operations

• or after a certain amount of transactions

The configuration for automatic index optimization can be defined on a global level or per index:

Example 7.1. Defining automatic optimization parameters

hibernate.search.default.optimizer.operation_limit.max = 1000
hibernate.search.default.optimizer.transaction_limit.max = 100
hibernate.search.Animal.optimizer.transaction_limit.max = 50

With the above example an optimization will be triggered to the Animal index as soon as either:

• the number of additions and deletions reaches 1000

• the number of transactions reaches 50

(hibernate.search.Animal.optimizer.transaction_limit.max having priority over
hibernate.search.default.optimizer.transaction_limit.max)

If none of these parameters are defined, no optimization is processed automatically.

The default implementation of OptimizerStrategy can be overriden by

implementing org.hibernate.search.store.optimization.OptimizerStrategy and setting
the optimizer.implementation property to the fully qualified name of your implementation. This
implementation must implement the interface, be a public class and have a public constructor
taking no arguments.

Example 7.2. Loading a custom OptimizerStrategy

hibernate.search.default.optimizer.implementation = com.acme.worlddomination.SmartOptimizer
hibernate.search.default.optimizer.SomeOption = CustomConfigurationValue
hibernate.search.humans.optimizer.implementation = default

The keyword default can be used to select the Hibernate Search default implementation; all
properties after the .optimizer key separator will be passed to the implementation's initialize
method at start.

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 Manual optimization

7.2. Manual optimization

You can programmatically optimize (defragment) a Lucene index from Hibernate Search through
the SearchFactory:

Example 7.3. Programmatic index optimization

FullTextSession fullTextSession = Search.getFullTextSession(regularSession);

SearchFactory searchFactory = fullTextSession.getSearchFactory();

searchFactory.optimize(Order.class);
// or
searchFactory.optimize();

The first example optimizes the Lucene index holding Orders; the second, optimizes all indexes.

Note

searchFactory.optimize() has no effect on a JMS or JGroups backend: you

must apply the optimize operation on the Master node.

7.3. Adjusting optimization

The Lucene index is constantly being merged in the background to keep a good balance between
write and read performance; in a sense this is a form of background optimization which is always
applied.

The following match attributes of Lucene's IndexWriter and are commonly used to tune how
often merging occurs and how aggressive it is applied. They are exposed by Hibernate Search via:

• hibernate.search.[default|<indexname>].indexwriter.max_buffered_docs

• hibernate.search.[default|<indexname>].indexwriter.max_merge_docs

• hibernate.search.[default|<indexname>].indexwriter.merge_factor

• hibernate.search.[default|<indexname>].indexwriter.ram_buffer_size

• hibernate.search.[default|<indexname>].indexwriter.term_index_interval
See Section 3.7.1, “Tuning indexing performance” for a description of these properties.

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Chapter 8.

Monitoring
Hibernate Search offers access to a Statistics object via SearchFactory.getStatistics().
It allows you for example to determine which classes are indexed and how many
entities are in the index. This information is always available. However, by specifying the
hibernate.search.generate_statistics property in your configuration you can also collect
total and average Lucene query and object loading timings.

8.1. JMX
You can also enable access to the statistics via JMX. Setting
the property hibernate.search.jmx_enabled will automatically register the
StatisticsInfoMBean. Depending on your the configuration the IndexControlMBean and
IndexingProgressMonitorMBean will also be registered. In case you are having more than
one JMX enabled Hibernate Search instance running within a single JVM, you should also set
hibernate.search.jmx_bean_suffix to a different value for each of the instances. The specified
suffix will be used to distinguish between the different MBean instances. Let's have a closer look
at the mentioned MBeans.

Tip

If you want to access your JMX beans remotely via JConsole make sure to set the
system property com.sun.management.jmxremote to true.

8.1.1. StatisticsInfoMBean
This MBean gives you access to Statistics object as desribed in the previous section.

8.1.2. IndexControlMBean
This MBean allows to build, optimize and purge the index for a given entity. Indexing occurs
via the mass indexing API (seeSection 6.3.2, “Using a MassIndexer”). A requirement for this
bean to be registered in JMX is, that the Hibernate SessionFactory is bound to JNDI via
the hibernate.session_factory_name property. Refer to the Hibernate Core manual for more
information on how to configure JNDI. The IndexControlMBean and its API are for now
experimental.

8.1.3. IndexingProgressMonitorMBean
This MBean is an implementation MassIndexerProgressMonitor interface. If
hibernate.search.jmx_enabled is enabled and the mass indexer API is used the indexing
progress can be followed via this bean. The bean will only be bound to JMX while indexing is in
progress. Once indexing is completed the MBean is not longer available.

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Chapter 9.

Spatial
With the Spatial extensions you can combine fulltext queries with restrictions based on distance
from a point in space, filter results based on distances from coordinates or sort results on such
a distance criteria.

The spatial support of Hibernate Search has a few goals:

• Enable spatial search on entities: find entities within x km from a location (latitude, longitude)
on Earth

• Provide an easy way to enable spatial indexing via expressive annotations

• Provide a simple way for querying

• Hide geographical complexity

For example, you might search for that Italian place named approximately "Il Ciociaro" and is
somewhere in the 2 km area around your office.

To be able to filter an @Indexed @Entity on a distance criteria you need to add the @Spatial
annotation (org.hibernate.search.annotations.Spatial) and specify one or more sets of
coordinates.

9.1. Enable indexing of Spatial Coordinates

There are different techniques to index point coordinates, in particular Hibernate Search Spatial
offers a choice between two strategies:

• as numbers formatted for range queries

• in Quad-Tree labels for two stage spatial queries

We will now describe both methods so you can make a suitable choice; of course you can
pick different strategies for each set of coordinates. These strategies are selected by specifying
spatialMode, an attribute of the @Spatial annotation.

9.1.1. Indexing coordinates for Double Range Queries

When setting the @Spatial.spatialMode attribute to SpatialMode.RANGE (which is the default)
coordinates are indexed as numeric fields, so that range queries can be performed to narrow
down the initial area of interest.

Pros:

• Is quick on small data sets (< 100k entities)

• Is very simple: straightforward to debug/analyze

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Chapter 9. Spatial

• Impact on index size is moderate

Cons:

• Poor performance on large data sets

• Poor performance if your data set is distributed across the whole world (for example when
indexing points of interest in the United States, in Europe and in Asia, large areas collide
because they share the same latitude. The latitude range query returns large amounts of data
that need to be cross checked with those returned by the longitude range).

To index your entities for range querying you have to:

• add the @Spatial annotation on your entity

• add the @Latitude and @Longitude annotations on your properties representing the
coordinates; these must be of type Double

Example 9.1. Sample Spatial indexing: Hotel class

import org.hibernate.search.annotations.*;

@Spatial @Indexed @Entity

public class Hotel {

@Latitude
Double latitude

@Longitude
Double longitude
[..]

9.1.2. Indexing coordinates in a Grid with Quad Trees

When setting @Spatial.spatialMode to SpatialMode.GRID the coordinates are encoded in
several fields representing different zoom levels. Each box for each level is labelled so coordinates
are assigned matching labels for each zoom level. This results in a tree encoding of labels called
quad tree.

Pros :

• Good performance even with large data sets

• World wide data distribution independent

Cons :

• Index size is larger: need to encode multiple labels per pair of coordinates

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 Implementing the Coordinates interface

To index your entities you have to:

• add the @Spatial annotation on the entity with the SpatialMode set to GRID :
@Spatial(spatialMode = SpatialMode.GRID)

• add the @Latitude and @Longitude annotations on the properties representing your
coordinates; these must be of type Double

Example 9.2. Indexing coordinates in a Grid using Quad Trees

@Spatial(spatialMode = SpatialMode.GRID)
@Indexed
@Entity
public class Hotel {

@Latitude
Double latitude;

@Longitude
Double longitude;

[...]

9.1.3. Implementing the Coordinates interface

Instead of using the @Latitude and @Longitue annotations you can choose to implement the
org.hibernate.search.spatial.Coordinates interface.

Example 9.3. Implementing the Coordinates interface

import org.hibernate.search.annotations.*;
import org.hibernate.search.spatial.Coordinates;

@Spatial @Indexed @Entity

public class Song implements Coordinates {

@Id long id;

double latitude;
double longitude;
[...]

@Override
Double getLatitude() {
return latitude;
}

@Override
Double getLongitude() {
return longitude;
}

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Chapter 9. Spatial

[...]

As we will see in the section Section 9.3, “Multiple Coordinate pairs”, a @Spatial
@Indexed @Entity can have multiple @Spatial annotations; when having the entity implement
Coordinates, the implemented methods refer to the default Spatial name: the default pair of
coordinates.

An alternative is to use properties implementing the Coordinates interface; this way you can have
multiple Spatial instances:

Example 9.4. Using attributes of type Coordinates

@Indexed @Entity
public class Event {
@Id
Integer id;

@Field(store = Store.YES)
String name;

double latitude;
double longitude;

@Spatial(spatialMode = SpatialMode.GRID)
public Coordinates getLocation() {
return new Coordinates() {
@Override
public Double getLatitude() {
return latitude;
}

@Override
public Double getLongitude() {
return longitude;
}
};
}

[...]

When using this form the @Spatial .name automatically defaults to the propery name.

9.2. Performing Spatial Queries

The Hibernate Search DSL has been extended to support the spatial feature. You can build a
query to search around a pair of coordinates (latitude,longitude) or around a bean implementing
the Coordinates interface.

As with any fulltext queries, also for Spatial queries you:

• retrieve a QueryBuilder from the SearchFactory as a starting point

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 Returning distance to query point in the search results

• use the DSL to build a spatial query with your search center and radius

• optionally combine the resulting Query with other filters

• call the createFullTextQuery() and use run it as any standard Hibernate or JPA Query

Example 9.5. Search for an Hotel by distance

QueryBuilder builder = fullTextSession.getSearchFactory()

.buildQueryBuilder().forEntity( Hotel.class ).get();

org.apache.lucene.search.Query luceneQuery = builder.spatial()

.onDefaultCoordinates()
.within( radius, Unit.KM )
.ofLatitude( centerLatitude )
.andLongitude( centerLongitude )
.createQuery();

org.hibernate.Query hibQuery = fullTextSession.createFullTextQuery( luceneQuery,

Hotel.class );
List results = hibQuery.list();

A fully working example can be found in the source code, in the testsuite. See
SpatialIndexingTest.testSpatialAnnotationOnClassLevel() and in the Hotel class.

As an alternative to passing separate values for latitude and longitude values, you can also pass
an object implementing the Coordinates interface:

Example 9.6. DSL example with Coordinates

Coordinates coordinates = Point.fromDegrees(24d, 31.5d);

Query query = builder
.spatial()
.onCoordinates( "location" )
.within( 51, Unit.KM )
.ofCoordinates( coordinates )
.createQuery();

List results = fullTextSession.createFullTextQuery( query, POI.class ).list();

9.2.1. Returning distance to query point in the search results

9.2.1.1. Returning distance to the center in the results

To get the distance to the center of the search returned with the results you just need to project it:

Example 9.7. Distance projection example

double centerLatitude = 24.0d;

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Chapter 9. Spatial

double centerLongitude= 32.0d;

QueryBuilder builder = fullTextSession.getSearchFactory()

.buildQueryBuilder().forEntity(POI.class).get();
org.apache.lucene.search.Query luceneQuery = builder.spatial()
.onCoordinates("location")
.within(100, Unit.KM)
.ofLatitude(centerLatitude)
.andLongitude(centerLongitude)
.createQuery();

FullTextQuery hibQuery = fullTextSession.createFullTextQuery(luceneQuery, POI.class);

hibQuery.setProjection(FullTextQuery.SPATIAL_DISTANCE, FullTextQuery.THIS);
hibQuery.setSpatialParameters(centerLatitude, centerLongitude, "location");
List results = hibQuery.list();

• Use FullTextQuery.setProjection with FullTextQuery.SPATIAL_DISTANCE as one of the

projected fields.

• Call FullTextQuery.setSpatialParameters with the latitude, longitude and the name of the
spatial field used to build the spatial query. Note that using coordinates different thans the center
used for the query will have unexpected results.

Distance projection and null values

Using distance projection on non @Spatial enabled entities and/or with a non
spatial Query will have unexpected results as entities not spatially indexed and/or
having null values for latitude or longitude will be considered to be at (0,0)/(lat,0)/
(0,long).

Using distance projection with a spatial query on spatially indexed entities having,
eventually, null values for latitude and/or longitude is safe as they will not be found
by the spatial query and won't have distance calculated.

9.2.1.2. Sorting by distance

To sort the results by distance to the center of the search you will have to build a Sort object using
a DistanceSortField:

Example 9.8. Distance sort example

double centerLatitude = 24.0d;

double centerLongitude = 32.0d;

QueryBuilder builder = fullTextSession.getSearchFactory()

.buildQueryBuilder().forEntity( POI.class ).get();
org.apache.lucene.search.Query luceneQuery = builder.spatial()
.onCoordinates("location")
.within(100, Unit.KM)

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 Multiple Coordinate pairs

.ofLatitude(centerLatitude)
.andLongitude(centerLongitude)
.createQuery();

FullTextQuery hibQuery = fullTextSession.createFullTextQuery(luceneQuery, POI.class);

Sort distanceSort = new Sort(
new DistanceSortField(centerLatitude, centerLongitude, "location"));
hibQuery.setSort(distanceSort);

The DistanceSortField must be constructed using the same coordinates on the same spatial
field used to build the spatial query otherwise the sorting will occur with another center than the
query. This repetition is needed to allow you to define Queries with any tool.

Sorting and null values

Using distance sort on non @Spatial enabled entities and/or with a non spatial
Query will have also unexpected results as entities non spatially indexed and/or
with null values for latitude or longitude will be considered to be at (0,0)/(lat,0)/
(0,long)

Using distance sort with a spatial query on spatially indexed entities having,
potentially, null values for latitude and/or longitude is safe as they will not be found
by the spatial query and so won't be sorted

9.3. Multiple Coordinate pairs

You can associate multiple pairs of coordinates to the same entity, as long as each pair is uniquelly
identified by using a different name. This is achieved by stacking multiple @Spatial annotations
in a @Spatials annotation, and specifying the name attribute on the @Spatial annotation.

Example 9.9. Multiple sets of coordinates

import org.hibernate.search.annotations.*;

@Spatials({
@Spatial,
@Spatial(name="work", spatialMode = SpatialMode.GRID)
})
@Entity
@Indexed
public class UserEx {

@Id
Integer id;

@Latitude
Double homeLatitude;

@Longitude

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Chapter 9. Spatial

Double homeLongitude;

@Latitude(of="work")
Double workLatitude;

@Longitude(of="work")
Double workLongitude;

In the example Example 9.5, “Search for an Hotel by distance” we used

onDefaultCoordinates() which points to the coordinates defined by a @Spatial annotation
whose name attribute was not specified.

To target an alternative pair of coordinates at query time, we need to specify the pair by name
using onCoordinates (String) instead of onDefaultCoordinates():

Example 9.10. Querying on non-default coordinate set

QueryBuilder builder = fullTextSession.getSearchFactory()

.buildQueryBuilder().forEntity( UserEx.class ).get();

org.apache.lucene.search.Query luceneQuery = builder.spatial()

.onCoordinates( "work" )
.within( radius, Unit.KM )
.ofLatitude( centerLatitude )
.andLongitude( centerLongitude )
.createQuery();

org.hibernate.Query hibQuery = fullTextSession.createFullTextQuery( luceneQuery,

Hotel.class );
List results = hibQuery.list();

9.4. Insight: implementation details of Quad Tree

indexing
The present chapter is meant to provide a technical insight in quad-tree (grid) indexing: how
coordinates are mapped to the index and how queries are implemented.

9.4.1. At indexing level

When Hibernate Search indexes the entity annotated with @Spatial, it instantiates a
SpatialFieldBridge to transform the latitude and longitude fields accessed via the Coordinates
interface to the multiple index fields stored in the Lucene index.

Principle of the spatial index: the spatial index used in Hibernate Search is a QuadTree (http://
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quadtree).

To make computation in a flat coordinates system the latitude and longitude field values will be
projected with a sinusoidal projection ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sinusoidal_projection [http://
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sinusoidal_projection]). Origin values space is :

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 At search level

[-90 -> +90],]-180 -> 180]

for latitude,longitude coordinates and projected space is:

]-pi -> +pi],[-pi/2 -> +pi/2]

for cartesian x,y coordinates (beware of fields order inversion: x is longitude and y is latitude).

The index is divided into n levels labeled from 0 to n-1.

At the level 0 the projected space is the whole Earth. At the level 1 the projected space is devided
into 4 rectangles (called boxes as in bounding box):

[-pi,-pi/2]->[0,0], [-pi,0]->[0,+pi/2], [0,-pi/2]->[+pi,0] and [0,0]->[+pi,+pi/2]

At level n+1 each box of level n is divided into 4 new boxes and so on. The numbers of boxes
at a given level is 4^n.

Each box is given an id, in this format: [Box index on the X axis]|[Box index on the Y axis] To
calculate the index of a box on an axis we divide the axis range in 2^n slots and find the slot the
box belongs to. At the n level the indexes on an axis are from -(2^n)/2 to (2^n)/2. For instance,
the 5th level has 4^5 = 1024 boxes with 32 indexes on each axis (32x32 is 1024) and the box of
Id "0|8" is covering the [0,8/32*pi/2]->[1/32*pi,9/32*pi/2] rectangle is projected space.

Beware! The boxes are rectangles in projected space but the related area on Earth is not a
rectangle!

Now that we have all these boxes at all these levels will be indexing points "into" them.

For a point (lat,long) we calculate its projection (x,y) and then we calculate for each level of the
spatial index, the ids of the boxes it belongs to.

At each level the point is in one and only one box. For points on the edges the box are considered
exclusive n the left side and inclusive on the right i-e ]start,end] (the points are normalized before
projection to [-90,+90],]-180,+180]).

We store in the Lucene document corresponding to the entity to index one field for each level
of the quad tree. The field is named: [spatial index fields name]_HSSI_[n]. [spatial index fields
name] is given either by the parameter at class level annotation or derived from the name of the
spatial annoted method of he entitiy, HSSI stands for Hibernate Search Spatial Index and n is
the level of the quad tree.

We also store the latitude and longitude as a Numeric field under [spatial index fields
name]_HSSI_Latitude and [spatial index fields name]_HSSI_Longitude fields. They will be used
to filter precisely results by distance in the second stage of the search.

9.4.2. At search level

Now that we have all these fields, what are they used for?

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Chapter 9. Spatial

When you ask for a spatial search by providing a search discus (center+radius) we will calculate
the boxes ids that do cover the search discus in the projected space, fetch all the documents
that belong to these boxes (thus narrowing the number of documents for which we will have to
calculate distance to the center) and then filter this subset with a real distance calculation. This
is called two level spatial filtering.

9.4.2.1. Step 1: compute the best quad tree level for the search
discus

For a given search radius there is an optimal quad tree level where the number of boxes to retrieve
hall be minimal without bringing back to many documents (level 0 has only 1 box but retrieve all
documents). The optimal quad tree level is the maximum level where the width of each box is
larger than the search area. Near the equator line where projection deformation is minimal, this
will lead to the retrieval of at most 4 boxes. Towards the poles where the deformation is more
significant, it might need to examine more boxes but as the sinusoidal projection has a simple
Tissot's indicatrix (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sinusoidal_projection) in populated areas, the
overhead is minimal.

9.4.2.2. Step 2: compute ids of the corresponding covering boxes at

that level

Now that we have chosen the optimal level, we can compute the ids of the boxes covering the
search discus (which is not a discus in projected space anymore).

This is done by org.hibernate.search.spatial.impl.SpatialHelper.getQuadTreeCellsIds(Point

center, double radius, int quadTreeLevel)

It will calculate the bounding box of the search discus and then call
org.hibernate.search.spatial.impl.SpatialHelper.getQuadTreeCellsIds(Point lowerLeft, Point
upperRight, int quadTreeLevel) that will do the actual computation. If the bounding box crosses
the meridian line it will cut the search in two and make two calls to getQuadTreeCellsIds(Point
lowerLeft, Point upperRight, int quadTreeLevel) with left and right parts of the box.

There are some geo related hacks (search radius too large, search radius crossing the poles) that
are handled in bounding box computations done by Rectangle.fromBoundingCircle(Coordinates
center, double radius) (see http://janmatuschek.de/LatitudeLongitudeBoundingCoordinates for
reference on those subjects).

The SpatialHelper.getQuadTreeCellsIds(Point lowerLeft, Point upperRight, int quadTreeLevel)

project the defining points of the bounding box and compute the boxes they belong to. It returns
all the box Ids between the lower left to the upper right corners, thus covering the area.

9.4.2.3. Step 3: Lucene index lookup

The Query is build with theses Ids to lookup for documents having a [spatial index fields
name]_HSSI_[n] (n the level found at Step 1) field valued with one of the ids of Step 2.

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 At search level

See also the implementation of org.hibernate.search.spatial.impl.QuadTreeFilter .

This Query will return all documents in the boxes covering the projected bounding box of the
search discus. So it is too large and needs refining. But we have narrowed the distance calculation
problems to a subet of our datas.

9.4.2.4. Step 4: refine

A distance calculation filter is set after the Lucene index lookup query of Step 3 to exclude false
candidates from the result list.

See SpatialQueryBuilderFromCoordinates.buildSpatialQuery(Coordinates center, double radius,

String fieldName)

155
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Chapter 10.

Advanced features
In this final chapter we are offering a smorgasbord of tips and tricks which might become useful
as you dive deeper and deeper into Hibernate Search.

10.1. Accessing the SearchFactory

The SearchFactory object keeps track of the underlying Lucene resources for Hibernate Search.
It is a convenient way to access Lucene natively. The SearchFactory can be accessed from a
FullTextSession:

Example 10.1. Accessing the SearchFactory

FullTextSession fullTextSession = Search.getFullTextSession(regularSession);

SearchFactory searchFactory = fullTextSession.getSearchFactory();

10.2. Using an IndexReader

Queries in Lucene are executed on an IndexReader. Hibernate Search caches index readers
to maximize performance and implements other strategies to retrieve updated IndexReaders in
order to minimize IO operations. Your code can access these cached resources, but you have to
follow some "good citizen" rules.

Example 10.2. Accessing an IndexReader

IndexReader reader = searchFactory.getIndexReaderAccessor().open(Order.class);

try {
//perform read-only operations on the reader
}
finally {
searchFactory.getIndexReaderAccessor().close(reader);
}

In this example the SearchFactory figures out which indexes are needed to query this entity.
Using the configured ReaderProvider (described in Reader strategy) on each index, it returns
a compound IndexReader on top of all involved indexes. Because this IndexReader is shared
amongst several clients, you must adhere to the following rules:

• Never call indexReader.close(), but always call readerProvider.closeReader(reader), using a

finally block.

• Don't use this IndexReader for modification operations: it's a readonly IndexReader, you would
get an exception).

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Chapter 10. Advanced features

Aside from those rules, you can use the IndexReader freely, especially to do native Lucene
queries. Using this shared IndexReaders will be more efficient than by opening one directly from
- for example - the filesystem.

As an alternative to the method open(Class... types) you can use open(String...

indexNames); in this case you pass in one or more index names; using this strategy you can also
select a subset of the indexes for any indexed type if sharding is used.

Example 10.3. Accessing an IndexReader by index names

IndexReader reader = searchFactory

.getIndexReaderAccessor()
.open("Products.1", "Products.3");

10.3. Accessing a Lucene Directory

A Directory is the most common abstraction used by Lucene to represent the index storage;
Hibernate Search doesn't interact directly with a Lucene Directory but abstracts these
interactions via an IndexManager: an index does not necessarily need to be implemented by a
Directory.

If you are certain that your index is represented as a Directory and need to access
it, you can get a reference to the Directory via the IndexManager. You will have
to cast the IndexManager instance to a DirectoryBasedIndexManager and then use
getDirectoryProvider().getDirectory() to get a reference to the underlying Directory. This
is not recommended, if you need low level access to the index using Lucene APIs we suggest to
see Section 10.2, “Using an IndexReader” instead.

10.4. Sharding indexes

In some cases it can be useful to split (shard) the data into several Lucene indexes. There are
two main use use cases:

• A single index is so big that index update times are slowing the application down. In this case
static sharding can be used to split the data into a pre-defined number of shards.

• Data is naturally segmented by customer, region, language or other application parameter and
the index should be split according to these segments. This is a use case for dynamic sharding.

Tip

By default sharding is not enabled.

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10.4.1. Static sharding

To enable static sharding set the

hibernate.search.<indexName>.sharding_strategy.nbr_of_shards property as seen in
Example 10.4, “Enabling index sharding”.

Example 10.4. Enabling index sharding

hibernate.search.[default|<indexName>].sharding_strategy.nbr_of_shards = 5

The default sharding strategy which gets enabled by setting this property, splits the data
according to the hash value of the document id (generated by the FieldBridge). This ensures
a fairly balanced sharding. You can replace the default strategy by implementing a custom
IndexShardingStrategy. To use your custom strategy you have to set the hibernate.search.
[default|<indexName>].sharding_strategy property to the fully qualified class name of your
custom IndexShardingStrategy.

Example 10.5. Registering a custom IndexShardingStrategy

hibernate.search.[default|<indexName>].sharding_strategy = my.custom.RandomShardingStrategy

10.4.2. Dynamic sharding

Dynamic sharding allows you to manage the shards yourself and even create new shards
on the fly. To do so you need to implement the interface ShardIdentifierProvider
and set the hibernate.search.[default|<indexName>].sharding_strategy property
to the fully qualified name of this class. Note that instead of implementing
the interface directly, you should rather derive your implementation from
org.hibernate.search.store.ShardIdentifierProviderTemplate which provides a basic
implementation. Let's look at Example 10.6, “Custom ShardidentiferProvider” for an example.

Example 10.6. Custom ShardidentiferProvider

public static class AnimalShardIdentifierProvider extends ShardIdentifierProviderTemplate {

@Override
public String getShardIdentifier(Class<?> entityType, Serializable id,
String idAsString, Document document) {
if ( entityType.equals(Animal.class) ) {
String type = document.getFieldable("type").stringValue();
addShard(type);
return type;
}
throw new RuntimeException("Animal expected but found " + entityType);

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@Override
protected Set<String> loadInitialShardNames(Properties properties, BuildContext buildContext) {
ServiceManager serviceManager = buildContext.getServiceManager();
SessionFactory sessionFactory = serviceManager.requestService(
HibernateSessionFactoryServiceProvider.class, buildContext);
Session session = sessionFactory.openSession();
try {
Criteria initialShardsCriteria = session.createCriteria(Animal.class);
initialShardsCriteria.setProjection( Projections.distinct(Property.forName("type")));

@SuppressWarnings("unchecked")
List<String> initialTypes = initialShardsCriteria.list();
return new HashSet<String>(initialTypes);
}
finally {
session.close();
}
}
}

The are several things happening in AnimalShardIdentifierProvider. First off its purpose is
to create one shard per animal type (e.g. mammal, insect, etc.). It does so by inspecting the class
type and the Lucene document passed to the getShardIdentifier() method. It extracts the type
field from the document and uses it as shard name. getShardIdentifier() is called for every
addition to the index and a new shard will be created with every new animal type encountered.
The base class ShardIdentifierProviderTemplate maintains a set with all known shards to
which any identifier must be added by calling addShard().

It is important to understand that Hibernate Search cannot know which shards already
exist when the application starts. When using ShardIdentifierProviderTemplate as base
class of a ShardIdentifierProvider implementation, the initial set of shard identifiers
must be returned by the loadInitialShardNames() method. How this is done will depend
on the use case. However, a common case in combination with Hibernate ORM is that
the initial shard set is defined by the the distinct values of a given database column.
Example 10.6, “Custom ShardidentiferProvider” shows how to handle such a case.
AnimalShardIdentifierProvider makes in its loadInitialShardNames() implementation use
of a service called HibernateSessionFactoryServiceProvider (see also Section 10.6, “Using
external services”) which is available within an ORM environment. It allows to request a Hibernate
SessionFactory instance which can be used to run a Criteria query in order to determine the
initial set of shard identifers.

Last but not least, the ShardIdentifierProvider also allows for optimizing searches by selecting
which shard to run a query against. By activating a filter (see Section 5.3.1, “Using filters in a
sharded environment”), a sharding strategy can select a subset of the shards used to answer
a query (getShardIdentifiersForQuery(), not shown in the example) and thus speed up the
query execution.

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Important
This ShardIdentifierProvider is considered experimental. We might need
to apply some changes to the defined method signatures to accomodate for
unforeseen use cases. Please provide feedback if you have ideas, or just to let us
know how you're using this API.

10.5. Sharing indexes

It is technically possible to store the information of more than one entity into a single Lucene index.
There are two ways to accomplish this:

• Configuring the underlying directory providers to point to the same physical index
directory. In practice, you set the property hibernate.search.[fully qualified entity
name].indexName to the same value. As an example let’s use the same index (directory) for the
Furniture and Animal entity. We just set indexName for both entities to for example “Animal”.
Both entities will then be stored in the Animal directory.

hibernate.search.org.hibernate.search.test.shards.Furniture.indexName = Animal
hibernate.search.org.hibernate.search.test.shards.Animal.indexName = Animal

• Setting the @Indexed annotation’s index attribute of the entities you want to merge to the same
value. If we again wanted all Furniture instances to be indexed in the Animal index along
with all instances of Animal we would specify @Indexed(index="Animal") on both Animal
and Furniture classes.

Note
This is only presented here so that you know the option is available. There is
really not much benefit in sharing indexes.

10.6. Using external services

Any of the pluggable contracts we have seen so far allows for the injection of a service. The most
notable example being the DirectoryProvider. The full list is:

• DirectoryProvider

• ReaderProvider

• OptimizerStrategy

• BackendQueueProcessor

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• Worker

• ErrorHandler

• MassIndexerProgressMonitor

Some of these components need to access a service which is either available in the environment
or whose lifecycle is bound to the SearchFactory. Sometimes, you even want the same service
to be shared amongst several instances of these contract. One example is the ability the share an
Infinispan cache instance between several directory providers running in different JVMs to store
the various indexes using the same underlying infrastructure; this provides real-time replication
of indexes across nodes.

10.6.1. Exposing a service

To expose a service, you need to implement
org.hibernate.search.spi.ServiceProvider<T>. T is the type of the service you want to use.
Services are retrieved by components via their ServiceProvider class implementation.

10.6.1.1. Managed services

If your service ought to be started when Hibernate Search starts and stopped when Hibernate
Search stops, you can use a managed service. Make sure to properly implement the start and
stop methods of ServiceProvider. When the service is requested, the getService method is
called.

Example 10.7. Example of ServiceProvider implementation

public class CacheServiceProvider implements ServiceProvider<Cache> {

private CacheManager manager;

public void start(Properties properties) {

//read configuration
manager = new CacheManager(properties);
}

public Cache getService() {

return manager.getCache(DEFAULT);
}

void stop() {
manager.close();
}
}

Note
The ServiceProvider implementation must have a no-arg constructor.

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 Using a service

To be transparently discoverable, such service should have an accompanying META-INF/

services/org.hibernate.search.spi.ServiceProvider whose content list the (various)
service provider implementation(s).

Example 10.8. Content of META-INF/services/

org.hibernate.search.spi.ServiceProvider

com.acme.infra.hibernate.CacheServiceProvider

10.6.1.2. Provided services

Alternatively, the service can be provided by the environment bootstrapping Hibernate Search.
For example, Infinispan which uses Hibernate Search as its internal search engine can pass the
CacheContainer to Hibernate Search. In this case, the CacheContainer instance is not managed
by Hibernate Search and the start/stop methods of its corresponding service provider will not
be used.

Note
Provided services have priority over managed services. If a provider service is
registered with the same ServiceProvider class as a managed service, the
provided service will be used.

The provided services are passed to Hibernate Search via the SearchConfiguration interface
(getProvidedServices).

Important
Provided services are used by frameworks controlling the lifecycle of Hibernate
Search and not by traditional users.

If, as a user, you want to retrieve a service instance from the environment, use registry services
like JNDI and look the service up in the provider.

10.6.2. Using a service

Many of of the pluggable contracts of Hibernate Search can use services. Services are accessible
via the BuildContext interface.

Example 10.9. Example of a directory provider using a cache service

public CustomDirectoryProvider implements DirectoryProvider<RAMDirectory> {

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private BuildContext context;

public void initialize(

String directoryProviderName,
Properties properties,
BuildContext context) {
//initialize
this.context = context;
}

public void start() {

Cache cache = context.requestService(CacheServiceProvider.class);
//use cache
}

public RAMDirectory getDirectory() {

// use cache
}

public stop() {
//stop services
context.releaseService(CacheServiceProvider.class);
}
}

When you request a service, an instance of the service is served to you. Make sure to
then release the service. This is fundamental. Note that the service can be released in the
DirectoryProvider.stop method if the DirectoryProvider uses the service during its lifetime
or could be released right away of the service is simply used at initialization time.

10.7. Customizing Lucene's scoring formula

Lucene allows the user to customize its scoring formula by extending
org.apache.lucene.search.Similarity. The abstract methods defined in this class match the
factors of the following formula calculating the score of query q for document d:
2
score(q,d) = coord(q,d) · queryNorm(q) · ∑ t in q ( tf(t in d) · idf(t) · t.getBoost() · norm(t,d) )

Factor Description
tf(t ind) Term frequency factor for the term (t) in the
document (d).
idf(t) Inverse document frequency of the term.
coord(q,d) Score factor based on how many of the query
terms are found in the specified document.
queryNorm(q) Normalizing factor used to make scores
between queries comparable.
t.getBoost() Field boost.
norm(t,d) Encapsulates a few (indexing time) boost and
length factors.

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 Customizing Lucene's scoring formula

It is beyond the scope of this manual to explain this formula in more detail. Please refer to
Similarity's Javadocs for more information.

Hibernate Search provides two ways to modify Lucene's similarity calculation.

First you can set the default similarity by specifying the fully specified classname of your
Similarity implementation using the property hibernate.search.similarity. The default
value is org.apache.lucene.search.DefaultSimilarity.

Secondly, you can override the similarity used for a specific index by setting the similarity
property for this index (see Section 3.3, “Directory configuration” for more information about index
configuration):

hibernate.search.[default|<indexname>].similarity = my.custom.Similarity

As an example, let's assume it is not important how often a term appears in a document.
Documents with a single occurrence of the term should be scored the same as documents with
multiple occurrences. In this case your custom implementation of the method tf(float freq)
should return 1.0.

Note

When two entities share the same index they must declare the same Similarity
implementation.

Note

The use of @Similarity which was used to configure the similarity on a class level
is deprecated since Hibernate Search 4.4. Instead of using the annotation use the
configuration property.

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Chapter 11.

Further reading
Last but not least, a few pointers to further information. We highly recommend you to get a
copy Hibernate Search in Action [http://www.manning.com/bernard/]. This excellent book covers
Hibernate Search in much more depth than this online documentation can and has a great range
of additional examples. If you want to increase your knowledge of Lucene we recommend Lucene
in Action (Second Edition) [http://www.manning.com/hatcher3/]. Because Hibernate Search's
functionality is tightly coupled to Hibernate Core it is a good idea to understand Hibernate. Start
with the online documentation [http://www.hibernate.org/docs] or get hold of a copy of Java
Persistence with Hibernate [http://www.manning.com/bauer2/].

If you have any further questions regarding Hibernate Search or want to share some of your use
cases have a look at the Hibernate Search Wiki [https://community.jboss.org/en/hibernate/search]
and the Hibernate Search Forum [https://forum.hibernate.org/viewforum.php?f=9]. We are looking
forward hearing from you.

In case you would like to report a bug use the Hibernate Search JIRA [https://
hibernate.atlassian.net/browse/HSEARCH] instance. Feedback is always welcome!

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