Question

I have a Person entity with multiple name related properties (firstName, lastName, title).
All the name related properties should be stored in a single lucene index field “fullName”.

@Indexed
@Entity
public class Person {
   ...
   private String firstName;
   private String lastName;
   private String title;

   @Field(store=Store.NO, index=Index.TOKENIZED)
   public String getFullName() {
      return firstName + " " + lastName + " " + title;
   }
}

The only problem I’m facing is to automatically update the fullName in the index when a name related property is updated.

Is there some way to tell Hibernate Search that fullName is a composed field and must be updated when one of the parts changes? Maybe something like this?

@ComposedOf({"firstName", "lastName", "title"})

Thank you!

Answer 1

@Indexed
@Entity
public class Person {
   ...
   @Field(name="fullName") String firstName;
   @Field(name="fullName") String lastName;
   @Field(name="fullName") String title;
}

This is possible as you have chosen TOKENIZED and I’m assuming your analyzer is set to split the tokens on whitespace as you’re adding whitespace to separate them: you can have multiple repetitions of a same field, the result is almost the same as splitting the compound terms
(I say almost as it won’t be able to determine ordering of terms in case you need a PhraseQuery looking for a specific order of keywords).

For more complex cases you would use a ClassBridge which disables the dirty-checking optimisation which has been annoying you in this case: Hibernate Search tracks if any persistent field was actually written to to decide if it can skip expensive reindexing operations but is then unable to detect such tricks.