Hi,

I have a class Foo consisting of two fields (name and alternateNames) currently defined as follows:

@Entity
@Indexed
public class Foo {
@Field
String name ;

@ElementCollection
@IndexedEmbedded
Set<String> alternateNames = new HashSet<String>();
}
What I want is to search name and alternateNames together as part of one search operation, perhaps by adding the strings from alternateNames to name:? How can this be done? (The (excellent) Hibernate Search book doesn't seem to cover this case.)

Thanks for your help.

you can specify that they should both use the same field, but I'd really discourage this.
Once they are indexed this way, you're stuck and can't separate them if you need (for example, to apply some boosting).
Much better, have your queries written in such a way that they look into both fields.

As a sidenode, make sure you define a FieldBridge on alternateNames: @ElementCollection is not automatically supported right now.

Thanks

I see your point, but still don't know how to annotate the classes so I can search both fields. If it's just adding the FieldBridge mentioned below, could you please supply an example that would work? Thanks again.

hi, sorry for the late answer. for some reason I missed the forum notification.

You need a custom FieldBridge on your alternateNames properties, which would look very similar to this one:
https://forum.hibernate.org/viewtopic.php?p=2441601#p2441601

Just make sure you cast the value to a Set and not to an Array as I did in that example.

To store both alternateNames and name, you just override the @Field attribute "name":
@Field(name="sameForBoth")

Still, I wouldn't do that, you should be better of making a Query targeting both fields.