Hi,

I am new to hibernate search and apologize in advance for the basic nature of my question.

According to the documentation, one has to build a Lucene query and use it to perform a search, and the creation of the Lucene query is out of scope.

I have defined @Fields and boost factors using annotations in my entity classes, which hibernate search uses for indexing. Could the annotations not be used in building the query, in simple cases?

My simple case is: use all fields annotations, and OR them. It seems that what i need to do is create a Boolean query and add one query clause for each field I have defined, using the boost factors I already have defined in the entity classes.
* Is there a utility that does this for me automatically?
* Otherwise, does the hibernate search api provide a way to instantiate or initialize query clauses from org.hibernate.search.annotations.* annotations used in entity classes (or xml config)?

Thank you.

Hi jbells, welcome.
The way you make queries is not always the "inverse process" of how the index is built, you'll grasp that concept with a bit of practice, so creating a query from the annotated model would rarely cover a real world use case, it's way more likely that for a specific query you need to select a subset of fields, and apply some options to the way they are used.

See the first query example in the reference documentation, it uses a MultiFieldQueryParser which is handy to implement what you're asking.
So you need to define a set of fields to be considered, but no more work is needed. The boost factors defined as entities are applied at index time, so there's no need to specify them again at query time (that will get you a different result).
In more advanced chapters there are some hints about when you should consider index-time boosting or query time-boosting; it's very advanced (read: hard to maintain and understand, rarely used) to define boosting at both query time and index time, so especially during your first experiments avoid it unless you're an expert in scoring, relevancy and precision of information retrieval systems.

Let me know if this is more clear to you now, or we might consider improving that first chapter.