Lucene Server is an Erlang application that let's you manage and query documents using an in-memory Lucene backend

Usage

To start the application just run lucene_server:start().

Contact Us

For questions or general comments regarding the use of this library, please use our public hipchat room.

If you find any bugs or have a problem while using this library, please open an issue in this repo (or a pull request :)).

And you can check all of our open-source projects at inaka.github.io

Adding/Deleting documents

To add documents use: lucene:add(Docs). where Docs :: [lucene:doc()] Each document is a proplist where the keys can be atoms, strings or binaries and the values can be numbers, atoms, strings or lucene:geo(). To delete documents use: lucene:del(Query). where Query is written respecting the Lucene Query Syntax.

Querying

To find documents according to a query use: lucene:match(Query, PageSize)., lucene:match(Query, PageSize, SortFields) or lucene:match(Query, PageSize, SortFields, Timeout). where:

• Query is written respecting the Lucene Query Syntax
• PageSize is the number of results per page you expect.
• SortFields is a list of atoms that will determine the result sort order for equally scored results
• Timeout is the number of milliseconds to wait for a return. If no Timeout is specified, it defaults to 5000. Not to have a timeout, you should use the atom infinity. Both functions may return:
• the atom timeout if it took more than Timeout milliseconds to find the desired docs
• the first page of results together with metadata as described below

Results

A results page looks like {Docs::[lucene:doc()], Data::lucene:metadata()} where:

• Docs is a list of no more than PageSize documents that match the Query
• Data is a proplist that include the following fields:
  • next_page: The token used to retrieve the following page (see below), if present
  • total_hits: How many documents match the query across all pages
  • first_hit: Which is the position of the first returned doc in the whole set of docs that match the query (e.g. if PageSize == 5, for the first page first_hit == 1; for the page #2, first_hit == 6; etc.)

Paging

To get the following page use: lucene:continue(PageToken, PageSize). or lucene:continue(PageToken, PageSize, Timeout). where PageToken comes from the metadata of the previous page and the rest of the parameters and results have the same types, format and meaning as in lucene:match/2 or lucene:match/4 functions.

Special Data Types

Besides what Lucene already offers, Lucene Server provides support for indexing and querying some extra data types:

Atoms

Atoms are treated as strings: You may add them as values in a document and query them using standard Lucene Query Syntax for strings

Numbers

Lucene Server lets you store integers and floats and then use them in range queries (i.e. <Field>:[<Min> TO <Max>]) properly, respecting the field's data type instead of treating them as strings as Lucene does by default.

Geo

Lucene Server provides support for managing and querying geo-spatial coordinates (i.e. latitude and longitude pairs).

• To construct a lucene:geo() object, use: lucene_utils:geo(Lat, Lng) where Lat and Lng are floating point numbers
• You can then use it as a value on a lucene:doc()
• To find documents near a certain point, include the following term in your query: <Field>.near:<Lat>,<Lng>,<Miles>. That query will filter documents within a <Miles> radio of <Lat>,<Lng> and also will rank results according to that distances (with closer docs ranking higher).

Special Queries

Calling an Erlang function

In the same way you can write ".near" queries, you can also write ".erlang" ones. The syntax is <Field>.erlang:<Module>:<Function>[:<Args>]. The function Module:Function is expected to comply with the following spec:

• If no args are provided: -spec Mod:Fun([term()]) -> [false | float()].
• If Args are provided (and they should be written as a list): -spec Mod:Fun(type_of_arg1(), type_of_arg2(),... [term()]) -> [false | float()].

The function will be called with the list of values for field Field and it is expected to return a list of results with the same length of the one received. For each element in the original list, the function may return (in the same place of the new list):

• false if it's not a match
• a float() representing the score of such a document