I've built a search index using the PHP Zend Framework Search (based on Lucene). The search is for a buy/sell website.
My search index includes the following fields:
item-id (UnIndexed)
item-title (Text)
item-description (UnStored)
item-tags (Text)
item-price (keyword)
seller-id (UnIndexed)
seller-name (Text)
I want the user to search the index, filtering their search by either only searching for items or searching for sellers by name.
If I do a search using Lucene's default search settings I will be searching all 5 item fields and the seller-name field. This is not what I want to happen. What I would like is when the user makes the search I want them to be required to select from a drop-down menu if they are searching for an item, or for a seller-name.
How can I tell the search query when searching for items to ignore the seller-name field? And when searching for seller-name's how can i tell the search query to not search across any of the item fields? Or is it better to create a separate index for the seller names?
Best Answer
There's currently no way to explicitly not search a field in Lucene's query language, or the
Zend_Search_Lucenequery constructing API.However, you can explicitly list which fields you do want to search in a query. An example would be:
If using this approach, you will have to explicitly list which fields you want to query, and what to search in them. So if you also needed to search your
item-titlefield with the same text, you would have to duplicate the above, but with the different field name. An example would be:You can, of course, do all this through the query building API that
Zend_Search_Luceneprovides, as well. The manual has some good examples there.One thing worth noting here is that, as you've discovered,
Zend_Search_Lucenewill search ALL fields by default. This is one of the ways in which it differs from Java Lucene. You may, however, set a default field to query, using thesetDefaultSearchFieldstatic method of theZend_Search_Luceneclass.