I am using Lucene to search a contacts database. By contacts I mean a name, multiple phone numbers, emails, addresses, etc etc. In the database these are obviously split into separate fields and even separate tables. I want to be able to search for contacts based on any of the fields so for instance I could type “John Doe” and Lucene would return John Doe’s contact info. John Doe also has a phone number and i’d like to be able to find his record by entering that phone number, or address, or email etc etc. I don’t want to have to specifically state what field I am searching for.
When creating my index, is it best to merge all the data into a single “data” field, or keep them separate? I will not be storing data in the index except for an id which I will use to retrieve all additional data from the database. Will the Standard Analyzer and Query Parser work well in my situation or should I take more of a custom approach?
I am fairly new to Lucene and am just learning how powerful it really is, so i’m not against really getting into it and creating some complicated custom search queries, but I will need some direction on doing so and want to avoid having to do all of that if its not at all necessary.
You need not create a single combined field, keeping them separate is probably a better design decision. Think down the line, you might want to do specialized searching.
You can use a MultiFieldQuery to search all the fields such as Name,Address, City…