Hi,

I have a question on the @boost annotation.

First What I'm trying to achieve:
I have an indexed database full of products. Some products have more content and images against them than others and I want to slightly favour these products using a boost. I plan to put a float getBoost() method in my entity class which will return a higher number for these items.

As far as i understand the @boost annotation can be used in the following 2 places:
1) At class level - i believe that setting this will boost all instances of that class
2) At field level - this boosts a particular field within the class.

In my case all indexed items are the same class. I want to use boost to differentiate between individual items.
I believe this is possible because Lucene has a document.setBoost() method:
http://lucene.apache.org/java/2_3_0/api ... 28float%29

So my question is: is there an annotation to set a dynamic boost value per entity instance? Is there some way to use the @boost annotation that I've missed? (Can an annotation have a dynamic value?)

If not, my next step will be to dive into the Hibernate Search interceptors to achieve what I need by manually calling document.setBoot()

Thanks for any insight you can provide,

Brendan Richards.

Hi,

what you are asking for is basically a dynamic boost. This feature is available in the latest beta version (3.2.0.Beta1) of Search. See HSEARCh-324

If you don't want to upgrade yet or are concerned about it being a beta, you could investigate using a ClassBridge. Using a class bridge you get a handle to the entity and the Lucene document. It is up to you and your usecase to make the best of it ;-)

Also, have you considered query time boosting?

--Hardy

Hi,

Exactly what I'm looking for, thanks!

I actually spent some time yesterday hacking around with org.hibernate.search.engine.DocumentBuilderIndexedEntity and got the behavior I wanted but I think I'll switch to the Beta.
I only implemented a DynamicBoost at class level while it looks like the new feature allows Dynamic Boost for class, filelds and methods.

Thanks for the tip on ClassBridge. Next time i need to hack around that looks like a safer option!

As for query time boosting, in my particular use case the boost value is entirely dependent on the saved properties of the object instance so index-time boosting seems to be a better fit. I'm assuming that index-time boosting will be more performant.

Brendan