Hi,

I have been using Hibernate search for a while now, and I am at a point where I need to implement a global heterogeneous search, where I would enter a query and then would need results from all types of entities on the site.

Do you guys have an idea what is the cleanest way to do this? I dont like the idea of forcing all my @Field annotations to have the same name, and using a MultiFieldQueryParser that contains a superset of all field names will cause maintenance headaches on the long run.

One thought was to create another Parser class that will just look for the field annotations in entities and construct the query using the field names it gleaned.

Another idea would be to add an adapter to each entity that would have the field annotations and delegate to the original entity, would that work? I dont want to save the adapter as an entity in the db so as not to duplicate data, will Hibernate search be able to handle indexing entities that do not exist in the db? how will it retrieve fields from that adapter that are not indexed?

And finally, does either of those ideas sound feasible? is there a better way to do this that I missed? It seems reasonable to assume that a site-wide text search is a common issue, so others must have had the same problem....

Thanks!

Using the same name for all your fields should be just fine, even if it seems odd at first.

You can assign multiple names to the same field using @Fields() so that the fields are still specially searchable.

that would be quite hard; you can have different persistence providers, as has been done for the JBoss Cache: http://jbosscache.blogspot.com/2008/07/jboss-cache-searchable.html but I don't think you will go that road.

The SearchFactory of course has a list of all annotated classes, and is holding all information you need to get a list of all declared Field.

I am not seeing particular use for a "search across all", you probably want to list what "all" means, as you may have exceptions one day.

the practice recommended by dobes looks like the best option IMHO, so you still can list classes to include or exclude dynamically.