Twice I have been frustrated when calling FullTextEntityManager.index() and it returning quickly and quietly doing nothing. Here are the reasons for those two cases:

The first time, I had been calling index() with an instance of Article which extends from ContentItem. While ContentItem had been annotated with @Indexed, Article had not. Annotating Article with @Indexed solved the problem.

The second time was due to the fact that I was calling index() in the context of a transaction. In this case, the indexing work is placed on a queue to be done later. Making sure that I commit any outstanding transaction before starting my manual indexing solved this problem.

Both times, I had enabled DEBUG logging for org.hibernate.search, but nothing was printed. The latest version of search (3.1.0.Beta1) now throws an IllegalArgumentException for the first case.

If you guys can do something to address the second case, it might save some poor hapless users the pain I endured.

Thanks!
Phil

Hello Phil,
thanks for your feedback, as you have already seen with the latest update the developers are trying to make better warnings and errors, but I'm afraid the second "issue" is actually a strong feature of Search: to keep the index consistent with the database it will not be updated unless you commit your changes to the entities, so even printing a warning would be misleading:
You should always use transactions, and don't expect anything to be done until you commit.


I agree, I became contributor myself to improve it on the points I have had to endure;-)

Do you think we should add additional warnings on the documentation?

Hi,
Thanks for accepting my feedback so graciously.

Now that I understand the situation, I agree that an error or even a debug message is not appropriate. The behavior makes sense to me now :)

Although I think it's best to make API's self-describing, in this case, it's probably a documentation issue.

The thing is... it never occurred to me that manually indexing all the objects in my database should involve transactions. But, now that it's pointed out, it makes sense. The fact that indexing is not part of the EntityManager API threw me off, I suppose.

Here's the current javadoc for index():
Force the (re)indexing of a given managed object. Indexation is batched per transaction

Here's my new understanding of how index() works:
Initiate the (re)indexing of a given managed object. If a transaction is active, the indexing work will be performed when the transaction is committed. Otherwise, the indexing work will be performed immediately.

Perhaps just updating the javadoc to something like that would help.

One thing I just noticed also, about this example:
http://www.hibernate.org/hib_docs/searc ... le/#d0e253

The JPA example does not show the use of a transaction, although the Hibernate version does. I suspect I ignored the hibernate example and just looked at the JPA one.

Thanks for volunteering to work on hibernate!
Phil

thanks, I'll see if I can update the docs ;-)