Our software system uses Hibernate Search to index relatively large object model.

We would like to implement a “global search” with following features:
* The user gives an arbitrary query string.
* The query string is matched against all indexed properties of all entities.
* If an entity property contains the query string somewhere in it, the entity is considered to match.
* We report not only matching entities, but also the entity property that caused the match.

As Hibernate search will create a field for every indexed entity property (/ database column), the amount of fields in an index grows in our case to hundreds. So far we haven’t found a way to do this query efficiently.

Is there a standard way to implement this kind of “global search”?

The search on all fields it should be as easy as targeting all fields of the index.

The main complexity of your request is to be able to tell which property actually matched. You could try to extract that information by also having it return an "explanation" object?



That will have the query return elements of type Object[], with two elements in each: the entity (as usual), and a description of how each different field matched the query.