grails searchable plugin query

Question

My Grails app is using the searchable plugin, which builds on Compass and Lucene to provide search functionality. I have two searchable classes, say Author and Book. I have mapped these classes to the search index, so that only certain fields can be searched.

To perform a search across both classes I simply call

def results = searchableService.search(query)

One of the nice features of doing the search across both class simultaneously, is that the results object includes metadata about number of results included, number of results available, pagination details etc.

I recently added a boolean approved flag to the Book class and I never want unapproved books to appear in the search results. One option is to replace the call above with:

def bookResults = Book.search(query + " approved:1")
def authorResults = Author.search(query)

However, I now need to figure out how to combine the metadata for both results, which is likely to be tricky (particularly pagination).

Is there a way to search across Book and Author with a single query, but only return approved books?

Answer 1

I've created a test app and came to the following solution. maybe it helps...

if the property approved only has the states 0 and 1, the following query will work:

def results = searchableService.search(
    "(${query} AND approved:1) OR (${query} -approved:0 -approved:1)"
)

I guess this can be reformulated in a better way if you don't use the QueryParser but the BooleanQueryBuilder.

BTW: if you add a method like

String getType() { "Book" }

and

String getType() { "Author" }

To your domains, you can even configure your search to do it like this

def results = searchableService.search(
    "(${query} AND approved:1) OR (${query} AND type:Author)"
)

Answer 2

Do you want to be able to find authors or do you want to find books with a given author?

If you want to find books with a given author, you can configure your domain classes in the following way:

class Author {
    String name
    ...

    static searchable = {
        root false
    }    
}

this will result in excluding the Author from the searchableService.search(query)-result and you'll find field names like $/Book/Author/name in your index. (use luke to examine your index: http://code.google.com/p/luke/).

You can change the name of those fields by configuring a better prefix in your Book-class:

class Book {
    String name
    Author author
    ...

    static searchable = {
        author component: [prefix: 'author']
    }    
}

this will change the name of the field in the index to bookauthor.

If you now search with searchableService.search(query), you'll find all books where the name of the book or the name of the author contains the search term. You can even restrict the search to a given author by using the authorname:xyz syntax.

---

If you really would like to mix the search results, I only know the solution you already mentioned: mixing both results with your own code, but I guess it will be hard to mix the scoring of the hits in a good way.

Update to your response: Here's my pagination code...

.gsp:

<div class="pagination">
  <g:paginate total="${resultsTotal}" params="[q: params.q]"/>
</div>

controller:

result = searchableService.search(params.q, params)
[
  resultList: result.results, 
  resultsTotal: result.total
]

So if you just merge the results of your two searches and add the result.totals, this could work for you.