I've been looking at integrating my domain model with Lucene to make it more easily searchable. Imagine my surprise and delight when I found out about Hibernate Search, since I already use Hibernate from all my persistence.

The only thing I have a question about is how Hibernate Search handles associations. For instance, if I wanted to map a Person and Company object, and a person can work for multiple companies (so I have a many-to-many relationship), how would the Lucene integration handle that association? Would I be able to search for all people who have "Jr" in their name and work at companies with "Inc." in the company name using a Lucene query? Would I have to create a custom FieldBridge to accomplish such a thing?

Thanks,
Rich

Hibernate Search is not aware of associations today, so such "join" (very relational operation) is not doable out-of-the-box.
The FieldBridge is a possible answer. Give the custom field bridge a try, and we 'll try to come up with a standard version of what you've done.
An alternative solution is the notion of @SearchEmbeddable (which is probably more promising)

PS let's move this thread on http://forum.hibernate.org/viewforum.php?f=9, which is where it belongs to