Package org.apache.lucene.document Description
The logical representation of a Document
for indexing and searching.
The document package provides the user level logical representation of content to be indexed and searched. The package also provides utilities for working with Document
s and Fieldable
s.
Document and Fieldable
A Document
is a collection of Fieldable
s. A Fieldable
is a logical representation of a user's content that needs to be indexed or stored. Fieldable
s have a number of properties that tell Lucene how to treat the content (like indexed, tokenized, stored, etc.) See the Field
implementation of Fieldable
for specifics on these properties.
Note: it is common to refer to Document
s having Field
s, even though technically they have Fieldable
s.
Working with Documents
First and foremost, a Document
is something created by the user application. It is your job to create Documents based on the content of the files you are working with in your application (Word, txt, PDF, Excel or any other format.) How this is done is completely up to you. That being said, there are many tools available in other projects that can make the process of taking a file and converting it into a Lucene Document
. To see an example of this, take a look at the Lucene demo and the associated source code for extracting content from HTML.
The DateTools
and NumberTools
classes are utility classes to make dates, times and longs searchable (remember, Lucene only searches text).
The FieldSelector
class provides a mechanism to tell Lucene how to load Documents from storage. If no FieldSelector is used, all Fieldables on a Document will be loaded. As an example of the FieldSelector usage, consider the common use case of displaying search results on a web page and then having users click through to see the full document. In this scenario, it is often the case that there are many small fields and one or two large fields (containing the contents of the original file). Before the FieldSelector, the full Document had to be loaded, including the large fields, in order to display the results. Now, using the FieldSelector, one can FieldSelectorResult.LAZY_LOAD
the large fields, thus only loading the large fields when a user clicks on the actual link to view the original content.