Question

I am creating a tagging system for my site

I got the basics of adding a document to lucene but i can seem to figure out how to delete a document or update one when the user changes the tags of something. I found pages that say use the document index and i need to optimize before effect but how do i get the document index? Also i seen another that said to use IndexWriter to delete but i couldnt figure out how to do it with that either.

I am using C# asp.net and i dont have java install on that machine

Answer 1

What version of Lucene are you using? The IndexWriter class has an update method that lets you update (BTW an update under the hood is really a delete followed by an add). You will need to have some identifier (such as as document id) which lets you update. When you index the document, add a unique document identifier such as a URL, a counter etc. Then the “Term” will be the ID of the document you wish to update. For example using URL you can update thus:

IndexWriter writer = ...
writer.update(new Term("id","http://somedomain.org/somedoc.htm"), doc);