Full Text Index
(3Q21)
This article provides information on configuring and using eXist-db's full text index.
Introduction
The full text index module is based on Apache Lucene.
The full-text index module is tightly integrated with eXist-db's modularized indexing architecture: the index behaves like a plug-in which adds itself to the database's index pipelines. Once configured, the index will be notified of relevant events, like adding/removing a document, removing a collection or updating single nodes. No manual re-indexing is required to keep the index up-to-date.
The full-text index module also implements common interfaces which are shared with other indexes, for instance for highlighting matches (see KWIC). It is easy to switch between the Lucene index and, for instance, the ngram index without rewriting much XQuery code.
Configuring the Index
The index has a single configuration parameter on the <modules>
/
<module>
element called buffer
. It defines the
amount of memory (in megabytes) Lucene will use for buffering index entries before they
are written to disk. See the Lucene Javadocs.
Like other indexes, you create a Lucene index by configuring it in a
collection.xconf
document as explained in documentation. For example:
You can define a Lucene index on a single element or attribute
(qname="..."
) or a node path with wildcards (match="..."
, see
below).
It is important make sure to choose the right context for an
index, which has to be the same as in your query. To better understand this, let's have
a look at how the index creation is handled by eXist-db and Lucene. For example:
<text qname="SPEECH">
This creates an index on <SPEECH>
only. What is passed to Lucene is the
string value of <SPEECH>
, which also includes the text of all its descendant
text nodes (except those filtered out by an optional
<ignore>
).
Consider the fragment:
<SPEECH>
<SPEAKER>
Second Witch
</SPEAKER>
<LINE>
Fillet of a fenny snake,
</LINE>
<LINE>
In the cauldron boil and bake;
</LINE>
</SPEECH>
If you have an index on <SPEECH>
, Lucene will use the text "Second
Witch Fillet of a fenny snake, In the cauldron boil and bake;"
and index it.
eXist-db internally links this Lucene document to the <SPEECH>
node, but Lucene
itself has no knowledge of that (it doesn't know anything about XML nodes).
Given this, take the following query:
//SPEECH[ft:query(., 'cauldron')]
This searches the index and finds the text, which eXist-db can trace back to the
<SPEECH>
node in the XML document.
However, it is required that you use the same context (<SPEECH>
) for creating
and querying the index. For instance:
//SPEECH[ft:query(LINE, 'cauldron')]
This will not return anything, even though <LINE>
is a
child of <SPEECH>
and cauldron
was indexed. This particular
cauldron
is linked to its ancestor <SPEECH>
, not its parent
<LINE>
.
However, you are free to give the user both options, i.e. use <SPEECH>
and
<LINE>
as context at the same time. For this define a second index on
<LINE>
:
<text qname="SPEECH"/>
<text qname="LINE"/>
Let's use a different example to illustrate this. Assume you have a document with encoded place names:
<p>
He loves
<placeName>
Paris
</placeName>
.
</p>
For a general query you probably want to search through all paragraphs. However, you
may also want to provide an advanced search option, which allows the user to restrict
his/her queries to place names. To make this possible, simply define an index on
<placeName>
as well:
<lucene>
<text qname="p"/>
<text qname="placeName"/>
</lucene>
Based on this setup, you'll be able to query for the word 'Paris' anywhere in a paragraph:
//p[ft:query(., 'paris')]
And also on 'Paris' occurring within a <placeName>
:
//p[ft:query(placeName, 'paris')]
Using match="..."
In addition to defining an index on a given qualified name, you can also specify a "path" with wildcards. This feature might be subject to change, so please be careful when using it.
Assume you want to define an index on all the possible elements below
<SPEECH>
. You can do this by creating one index for every element:
<text qname="LINE"/>
<text qname="SPEAKER"/>
As a shortcut, you can use a match
attribute with a
wildcard:
<text match="//SPEECH/*"/>
This will create a separate index on each child element of SPEECH it encounters. Please note that the argument to match is a simple path pattern, not a full XPath expression. For the time being, it only allows:
-
/
and//
to denote child or descendant steps, -
*
wildcard selector to match an arbitrary element, -
matching a single attribute's value, e.g.
foo[@bar = 'xyz']
As explained above, you have to figure out which parts of your document will
likely be interesting as context for a full text query. The full text index works
best if the context isn't too narrow. For example, if you have a document structure
with section <div>
s, headings and paragraphs, you would probably want to
create an index on the <div>
s and maybe on the headings, so the user can
differentiate between the two.
In some cases, you could decide to put the index on the paragraph level. Then you don't need the index on the section, since you can always get from the paragraph back to the section.
If you query a larger context, you can use the KWIC
module to show the user text surrounding each match. Or you can
ask eXist-db to highlight each match with
an <exist:match>
tag, which you can later use to locate the matches within
the text.
Whitespace Treatment and Ignored Content
We'll go into more detail with two common requirements when using full-text indexes.
Inlined elements
By default, eXist-db's indexer assumes that element boundaries break on a word or token. For example, if you have an element:
<size>
<width>
12
</width>
<height>
8
</height>
</size>
You want 12
and 8
to be indexed as separate tokens,
even though there's no whitespace between the elements. eXist-db will pass the
content of the two elements to Lucene as separate strings and Lucene will see
two tokens (instead of just 128
).
However, you usually don't want this behaviour for mixed content nodes. For example:
<p>
This is
<b>
un
</b>
clear.
</p>
In this case, you want unclear
to be indexed as a single word.
This can be done by telling eXist-db which nodes are inline nodes. The example
configuration above uses:
<inline qname="b"/>
The <inline>
option can both be specified globally or
per-index:
<text qname="p">
<inline qname="em"/>
</text>
Ignored elements
It is sometimes necessary to skip the content of an inline element. Notes are a good example:
<p>
This is a paragraph
<note>
containing an inline note
</note>
.
</p>
Use an <ignore>
element in the collection configuration to have
eXist-db ignore the note:
<ignore qname="note"/>
Basically, <ignore>
simply allows you to hide a chunk of text before
Lucene sees it.
Like the <inline>
tag, <ignore>
may appear both globally or
within a single index definition.
The <ignore>
only applies to descendants of an indexed element. You
can still create another index on the ignored element itself. For example, you
can have index definitions for <p>
and
<note>
:
<lucene>
<text qname="p"/>
<text qname="note"/>
<ignore qname="note"/>
</lucene>
If <note>
appears within <p>
, it will not be added to the
index on <p>
, only to the index on <note>
. For example:
//p[ft:query(., "note")]
This may not return a hit if "note"
occurs within a
<note>
, while this finds a match:
//p[ft:query(note, "note")]
Boost
A boost value can be assigned to an index to give it a higher score. The score for each match will be multiplied by the boost factor (default is: 1.0). For example, you may want to rank matches in titles higher than other matches.
Here's how to configure the documentation search indexes in eXist-db:
<lucene>
<analyzer class="org.apache.lucene.analysis.standard.StandardAnalyzer"/>
<text qname="section">
<ignore qname="title"/>
<ignore qname="programlisting"/>
<ignore qname="screen"/>
<ignore qname="synopsis"/>
</text>
<text qname="para"/>
<text qname="title" boost="2.0"/>
<ignore qname="title"/>
</lucene>
The <title>
index gets a boost of 2.0 to make sure that its matches get a
higher score. Since the <title>
element occurs within <section>
,
we add an ignore rule to the index definition on the section and create a separate
index on title. We also ignore titles occurring inside paragraphs. Without this,
title would be matched two times.
Because the title is now indexed separately, we need to query it explicitly. For example, to search the section and the title at the same time, one could issue the following query:
for $sect in /book//section[ft:query(., "ngram")] | /book//section[ft:query(title, "ngram")]
order by ft:score($sect) descending
return $sect
Attribute boost
Starting with eXist-db 3.0 a boost value can also be assigned to an index by
attribute. This can be used to weight your search results, even if you have flat
data structures with the same attribute value pairs in attributes throughout
your documents. Two flavours of dynamic weighting are available through the new
pairs <match-sibling-attribute>
, <has-sibling-attribute>
and
<match-attribute>
, <has-attribute>
child elements in the
full-text index configuration.
If you have data in Lexical metadata framework (LMF) format you will recognize
these repeated structures of <feat>
elements with att
and
val
attributes within <LexicalEntry>
elements. For
instance <feat att='writtenForm' val='LMF feature value'>
. The
attribute boosting allows you to weight the results based on the value of the
att
attribute so that hits in definitions come before hits in
comments and examples. This behaviour is enabled by adding a child
<match-sibling-attr>
to a Lucene configuration <text>
element.
An example index configuration for it looks like this:
<text qname="@val">
<match-sibling-attr boost="25" qname="att" value="writtenForm"/>
</text>
This means that the ft:score#1
function will boost hits in
val
attributes with a factor of 25 times for the
writtenForm
value of the att
attribute.
In the same way <match-attr>
would be used for element qnames in the
<text>
element.
If you do not care about any value of the sibling attribute, use the
<has-attribute>
index configuration variant. An example index
configuration with <has-attr>
looks like this:
<text qname="feat">
<has-attr boost="0" qname="xml:lang"/>
</text>
This means that if your <feat>
elements have an attribute
<xml:lang>
it will score them nil and push them last of the pack, which
might be useful to demote hits in features in other languages than the main
entry language.
In the same way <has-sibling-attr>
would be used for attributes in
the <text>
element.
Analyzers
One of the strengths of Lucene is that it allows the developer to determine nearly
every aspect of text analysis. This is done through analyzer classes, which combine
a tokenizer with a chain of filters to post-process the tokenized text. eXist-db's
Lucene module already allows different analyzers to be used for different indexes.
And starting from eXist version 5.3.0 - specifying a particular analyzer to be used
for processing a particular query (see query-analyzer-id
in
Additional parameters).
<lucene>
<analyzer class="org.apache.lucene.analysis.standard.StandardAnalyzer"/>
<analyzer id="ws" class="org.apache.lucene.analysis.core.WhitespaceAnalyzer"/>
<text match="//SPEECH//*"/>
<text qname="TITLE" analyzer="ws"/>
</lucene>
In the example above, we define that Lucene's StandardAnalyzer should be used by default (the <analyzer>
element
without id
attribute). We provide an additional analyzer and
assign it the id ws
, by which the analyzer can be referenced in
the actual index definitions and by queries specifying a particular analyzer that
should be used to process them (see query-analyzer-id
in
Additional parameters).
The whitespace analyzer is the most basic one. As the name implies, it tokenizes the text at white space characters, but treats all other characters - including punctuation - as part of the token. The tokens are not converted to lower case and there's no stopword filter applied.
eXist-db provides a special analyzer for characters with diacritics based on the
StandardAnalyzer
. The
NoDiacriticsStandardAnalyzer
can be switched on and off by
setting the diacritics
attribute on the <lucene>
element
of your index configuration file.
<collection xmlns="http://exist-db.org/collection-config/1.0">
<index>
<!-- Lucene indexes -->
<lucene diacritics="no">
<analyzer class="org.apache.lucene.analysis.standard.StandardAnalyzer"/>
<text match="//title[@xml:lang='Sa-Ltn']"/>
<text match="/TEI/text">
<ignore qname="text"/>
</text>
</lucene>
</index>
</collection>
Without diacritics ä
, å
, ā
,
etc will all be indexed as a
. Alternatively, this analyzer can
also be called by its full name.
<collection xmlns="http://exist-db.org/collection-config/1.0">
<index xmlns:xs="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema">
<lucene>
<analyzer class="org.exist.indexing.lucene.analyzers.NoDiacriticsStandardAnalyzer" id="nodiacritics"/>
<text qname="letter" analyzer="nodiacritics">
<field name="place" expression="place" analyzer="nodiacritics"/>
<field name="from" expression="from" store="no"/>
<field name="to" expression="to"/>
</text>
</lucene>
</index>
</collection>
Configuring the Analyzer
You can send configuration parameters to the instantiation of the Analyzer.
These parameters must match a Constructor
signature on the
underlying Java class of the Analyzer, please review the Javadoc for the
Analyzer that you wish to configure.
We currently support passing the following types:
-
java.lang.String
(default if no type is specified) -
java.lang.String[]
(since eXist-db 5.4.0) -
char[]
(since eXist-db 5.4.0) -
java.io.FileReader
orfile
-
java.lang.Boolean
orboolean
-
java.lang.Integer
orint
-
org.apache.lucene.analysis.util.CharArraySet
orset
-
java.lang.reflect.Field
The value Version#LUCENE_CURRENT is always added as first parameter for the
analyzer constructor (a fallback mechanism is present for older analyzers). The
previously valid values java.io.File
and java.util.Set
can not be used since Lucene 4.
For instance to add a stopword list, use one of the following constructions:
<analyzer id="stdstops" class="org.apache.lucene.analysis.standard.StandardAnalyzer">
<param name="stopwords" type="java.io.FileReader" value="/tmp/stop.txt"/>
</analyzer>
<analyzer id="stdstops" class="org.apache.lucene.analysis.standard.StandardAnalyzer">
<param name="stopwords" type="org.apache.lucene.analysis.util.CharArraySet">
<value>
the
</value>
<value>
this
</value>
<value>
and
</value>
<value>
that
</value>
</param>
</analyzer>
For instance to construct your custom analyzer you might use something like:
<analyzer id="my-custom-analyzer" class="tld.org.CustomAnalyzer">
<param name="minimumTermLength" type="int" value="2"/>
<param name="punctuationDictionary" type="char[]">
<value>'</value>
<value>-</value>
<value>’</value>
</param>
</analyzer>
Using the Snowball analyzer requires you to add additional libraries to
lib/user
.
<analyzer id="sbstops" class="org.apache.lucene.analysis.snowball.SnowballAnalyzer">
<param name="name" value="English"/>
<param name="stopwords" type="org.apache.lucene.analysis.util.CharArraySet">
<value>
the
</value>
<value>
this
</value>
<value>
and
</value>
<value>
that
</value>
</param>
</analyzer>
Facets and Fields
Starting with eXist 5.0, an index configuration may define additional facets and fields. Both can hold arbitrary content, which will be attached to the indexed parent node and can be used to further refine a query, sort results or display additional information to the user:
- facet
-
a facet defines a concept or information item by which the indexed items can be grouped. Typical facets would be categories taken from some pre-defined taxonomy, languages, dates, places or names occurring in a text corpus. The goal is to enable users to "drill down" into a potentially large result set by selecting from a list of facets displayed to them. For example, if you shop for a laptop, you are often presented with a list of facets with which you may restrict your result by CPU type, memory or screen size etc. As you select facets, the result set will become smaller and smaller.
Facets are always pre-defined at indexing time, so the drill down is very fast. They are meant for refining other queries, the assumption always is that the user selects one or more facets from a list of facet values associated with the current query results.
- field
-
a field contains additional, searchable content attached to an indexed parent node. In many cases fields will contain constructed content which is not directly found in the indexed XML or requires costly computation. For example, determining publication dates or author names for a set of articles may require some pre-processing which may be too expensive at query time. A field allows you to pre-compute those information items at indexing time.
Fields can be queried in the same expression as the parent node, resulting in fast response times. Their content can optionally be stored to speed up display or sorting. Fields may also use a different analyzer than the parent node, which allows e.g. multiple languages to be handled separately.
Facet and Field Configuration
Facets and fields are configured in a similar way. Both should appear nested
inside the parent index element they are attached to. Let's assume we have a
collection of articles written in docbook. Each article will have a top-level
<info>
element describing the article. Each <info>
element
contains a <title>
, one or more <author>
s and a list of
keywords in <keywordset>
.
Keywords are a perfect candidate for a facet, so let's start with it:
<collection xmlns="http://exist-db.org/collection-config/1.0">
<index xmlns:xs="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema" xmlns:db="http://docbook.org/ns/docbook">
<lucene>
<text qname="db:article">
<facet dimension="keyword" expression="db:info/db:keywordset/db:keyword"/>
</text>
</lucene>
</index>
</collection>
Every facet needs to have a dimension
attribute, defining the
name of the facet dimension the items will be added to. The values associated
with this facet dimension are determined by the expression
attribute: it may contain an arbitrary XQuery expression rooted in the parent
node being indexed. In the example the parent will be a <db:article>
element, so the context item for the expression is set to this element.
The expression is evaluated and for each result item, a facet value is added to the dimension using the string value of the item. Therefore if the expression returns multiple items, a facet for that dimension will also hold multiple values. If the expression returns the empty sequence for the current parent node, the corresponding facet will be empty as well.
A facet can also be defined to be hierarchical. A typical example would be a
date, which consists of a year, month and day component. By indexing the single
components as separate parts of a hierarchical facet, we enable the user to
drill down by year first, then by month and finally by day. Let's assume each of
our docbook articles has a <pubdate>
containing a date in
xs:date
format:
<collection xmlns="http://exist-db.org/collection-config/1.0">
<index xmlns:xs="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema" xmlns:db="http://docbook.org/ns/docbook">
<lucene>
<text qname="db:article">
<facet dimension="keyword" expression="db:info/db:keywordset/db:keyword"/>
<facet dimension="date" expression="tokenize(db:info/db:pubdate, '-')" hierarchical="yes"/>
</text>
</lucene>
</index>
</collection>
Hierarchical facets may also hold multiple values, for example if we would
like to associate our documents with a subject classification on various levels
of granularity (say: science with math
and physics as subcategories or
humanities with art,
sociology and history). This way we
enable the user to drill down into broad humanities or
science subject first and choose particular topics
afterwards. If the result of the hierarchical facet expression
evaluates to an array, each of array members will be treated as a hierarchical
value for that facet. Such an array could look in XQuery similar to
[('science', 'math'), ('humanities', 'history')]
and be a result of
evaluating a function like idx:subject-hierarchy
below stored in
an imported module (see below)
<collection xmlns="http://exist-db.org/collection-config/1.0">
<index xmlns:xs="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema" xmlns:db="http://docbook.org/ns/docbook">
<lucene>
<module uri="http://exist-db.org/lucene/test/" prefix="idx" at="module.xql"/>
<text qname="db:article">
<facet dimension="keyword" expression="db:info/db:keywordset/db:keyword"/>
<facet dimension="date" expression="tokenize(db:info/db:pubdate, '-')" hierarchical="yes"/>
<facet dimension="subject" expression="idx:subject-hierarchy(db:info/db:subjectset/db:subject/db:subjectterm)" hierarchical="yes"/>
</text>
</lucene>
</index>
</collection>
declare function idx:subject-hierarchy($key as xs:string*) {
array:for-each (array {$key}, function($k) {
doc('/db/subjects/subjects.xml')//subject[@name=$k]/ancestor-or-self::subject/@name
})
};
which assumes hierarchical subject structure stored in /db/subjects/subjects.xml
<subject>
<subject name="science">
<subject name="math"/>
<subject name="physics"/>
</subject>
<subject name="humanities">
<subject name="art"/>
<subject name="sociology"/>
<subject name="history"/>
</subject>
</subject>
Next, we may want to define fields for the authors and title of the article.
In docbook, <author>
can be a complex element, consisting e.g. of a
<personname>
with nested <surname>
and <firstname>
.
For display to the user and sorting we want to pre-compute a normalized string
out of those components:
<collection xmlns="http://exist-db.org/collection-config/1.0">
<index xmlns:xs="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema" xmlns:db="http://docbook.org/ns/docbook">
<lucene>
<text qname="db:article">
<facet dimension="keyword" expression="db:info/db:keywordset/db:keyword"/>
<field name="title" expression="db:info/db:title"/>
<field name="author" expression="for $au in db:info/db:author string-join(($au/db:personname/db:firstname, $au/db:personname/db:surname), ' ')"/>
</text>
</lucene>
</index>
</collection>
A field does not need to define an <expression>
attribute though: if
no expression is given, the field's content will be taken from the parent
element. This makes sense e.g. if you would like to index a node twice, e.g.
using a different analyzer. Or you can specify index="no"
on the
parent element and index its content with an explicit field.
A field may use a different analyzer than the one used to index the parent
content. Analyzers are referenced through analyzer
attribute as
described above.
Typed fields: fields may also declare a
type
attribute: supported values are atomic types like
xs:date
, xs:dateTime
, xs:time
,
xs:integer
, xs:decimal
and their sub-types. Defining a
type is important with respect to sorting (see below), e.g. to get dates in the
correct order. Typed fields can also be retrieved into corresponding XQuery
atomic values, so no additional casting is necessary. However, typed fields
cannot be queried using Lucene's default query parser, only retrieved with
ft:field
.
Storing fields: by default the complete content of a field is stored in the Lucene index, allowing later
fast retrieval of the content using ft:field
. You can disable storing the content by adding attribute
store="no"
. The field will still be indexed and available for queries though.
Binary fields: a special type of field offering faster access times than a normal field. Binary fields
are stored into a fast lookup table alongside the main index. Their content can be retrieved, but not queried, and you can declare a type
(see typed fields above). The default type will be xs:string
. Use a binary field if you frequently need to sort or
filter large node sets by a given field, e.g. when sorting by date:
<collection xmlns="http://exist-db.org/collection-config/1.0">
<index xmlns:xs="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema" xmlns:db="http://docbook.org/ns/docbook">
<lucene>
<module uri="http://exist-db.org/lucene/test/" prefix="idx" at="module.xql"/>
<text qname="db:article">
<facet dimension="keyword" expression="db:info/db:keywordset/db:keyword"/>
<field name="title" expression="db:info/db:title"/>
<field name="date" expression="db:info/db:pubdate" type="xs:date" binary="yes"/>
<field name="author" expression="idx:author(db:info/db:author)"/>
</text>
</lucene>
</index>
</collection>
Importing external modules: as can be seen in the field definition for "author" above, expressions can easily become quite verbose, so writing them into an attribute is not convenient. It is thus also possible to import one or more XQuery modules into the index configuration and use the functions declared in the module:
<collection xmlns="http://exist-db.org/collection-config/1.0">
<index xmlns:xs="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema" xmlns:db="http://docbook.org/ns/docbook">
<lucene>
<module uri="http://exist-db.org/lucene/test/" prefix="idx" at="module.xql"/>
<text qname="db:article">
<facet dimension="keyword" expression="db:info/db:keywordset/db:keyword"/>
<field name="title" expression="db:info/db:title"/>
<field name="author" expression="idx:author(db:info/db:author)"/>
</text>
</lucene>
</index>
</collection>
In this example we extract the code for computing the author field into a
function idx:authors
located in an XQuery module,
module.xql
. Note that we're using a relative import path for
the module in the at
attribute. The path will be resolved
relative to the collection to which the collection configuration applies (not
where the collection configuration itself is stored). It is also important that
the module and all dependencies it imports is stored before
the collection configuration is saved and indexing starts.
Conditions: sometimes you may want to create
a field only if a certain condition is met. For this purpose, an additional
attribute if
may be added, containing an XPath expression. If
the expression evaluates to an effective boolean value of
true
, the field will be created. Otherwise it is
skipped.
Conditions are useful to e.g. distinguish between different languages and
apply an appropriate analyzer to each. Let's assume our docbook articles may
have both, a German and English version. The language is indicated by the
@xml:lang
attribute on the top-level <section>
element. We
thus create a separate field for each language and connect it to the analyzer
appropriate for the language:
<collection xmlns="http://exist-db.org/collection-config/1.0">
<index xmlns:xs="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema" xmlns:db="http://docbook.org/ns/docbook">
<lucene>
<analyzer class="org.apache.lucene.analysis.de.GermanAnalyzer" id="german"/>
<analyzer class="org.apache.lucene.analysis.en.EnglishAnalyzer" id="english"/>
<text qname="db:article" index="no">
<field name="english" if="@xml:lang='en'" analyzer="english"/>
<field name="german" if="@xml:lang='de'" analyzer="german"/>
</text>
</lucene>
</index>
</collection>
Note that we skip indexing the parent <article>
element with
index="no"
because we do not want a default index, but rather a
separate field for each language, so we can target them in queries
explicitely.
Querying the Index
Querying full text from XQuery is straightforward. For example:
for $m in //SPEECH[ft:query(., "boil bubble")]
order by ft:score($m) descending
return $m
The query function takes a query string in Lucene's default query syntax. It returns a set of nodes which are relevant with respect to the query. Lucene assigns a relevance score or rank (a decimal number) to each match. This score is preserved by eXist-db and can be accessed through the score function.
The higher the score, the more relevant the text. You can use Lucene's features to "boost" a certain term in the query: give it a higher or lower influence on the final rank.
Please note that the score is computed relative to the root context of the index. If
you created an index on <SPEECH>
, all scores will be computed based on text in
<SPEECH>
nodes, even though your actual query may only return <LINE>
children of <SPEECH>
.
The query string passed to ft:query
may be empty. In this case all
items from the context sequence are matched and returned. Using an empty query makes
sense in combination with the options for retrieving facets and field values described
below.
The Lucene module is fully supported by eXist-db's query-rewriting optimizer. This means that the query engine can rewrite the XQuery expression to make best use of the available indexes. All the rules and hints given in the tuning guide fully apply to the Lucene index.
To present search results in a Keywords in Context format, you may want to have a look at eXist-db's KWIC module.
Querying Fields
Fields associated with the indexed parent node (see above) can be queried with
ft:query
by prefixing parts of the query expression with the
field name followed by a colon (':') as described in the documentation for Lucene's
default query syntax. For example, the following expression searches for a docbook
article containing the terms "xml" in the text and "xquery language" in the
title:
//db:article[ft:query(., "title:(xquery AND language) AND xml")]
Note how subexpressions can be grouped with parentheses to clearly state to which field they apply.
Retrieving Field Content
You can retrieve the content of a field for display or sorting purposes using the ft:field
function or alternatively the
ft:binary-field
function if you created a binary field. However, fields are always bound to the result of a full text query,
so you cannot retrieve them without calling ft:query
first.
One of the most common uses for retrieving field contents will be for sorting the
results of a query. The order by
in the example below sorts results by
title first and then by author.
for $article in collection("/db/articles")//db:article[ft:query(., "xquery")]
order by ft:field($article, "title"), ft:binary-field($article, "date", "xs:date")[1]
return
$article
Note that even though fields are only available with the results of the ft:query, it is still possible to use them for sorting and displaying the whole available data set. For example, to view all articles in the collection you could pass in an empty sequence in place of the query string like this:
//db:article[ft:query(., ())]
Typed fields: If you declared a different type than xs:string
on a field, you should
remember to use the 3-parameter variant of ft:field
or ft:binary-field
and pass in the name of the desired
target type as 3rd parameter. Reason: lucene basically stores all non-text data types as numbers and eXist has no way to figure out the original
type of the field. So if you defined a field (binary or not) with type xs:date
, make sure to retrieve it with
ft:binary-field($node, "date", "xs:date")
, otherwise you'll either get an error or garbage returned.
Matches in fields
When retrieving the content of a field for display, you may still need an indication
of where matches were found. You cannot use util:expand
for that
but need ft:highlight-field-matches
instead. Effectively it provides
the same mechanism as util:expand
for full text matches but works on fields.
-
util:expand
operates on nodes which are part of an XML document -
fields are attached to a node, but can contain arbitrary string content which may, but does not have to, be derived from the document
Thus util:expand
and ft:highlight-field-matches
behave differently
and produce slightly different output. ft:highlight-field-matches
is also faster as it
does not need to traverse the XML tree like util:expand
.
ft:highlight-field-matches
will return a field it
received in its first parameter with exist:match
tag wrapped around the matches.
For example, to display each matching article with its title, author and matched full
text as KWIC, you could start with the code below. Please note that
ft:highlight-field-matches
just returns
exist:field
with exist:match
inside, so you'd need
to further process the result for proper HTML output.
for $article in collection("/db/articles")//db:article[ft:query(., "lucene AND title:xquery AND author:wolfgang", map { "fields": ("title", "author") })]
order by ft:field($article, "title")[1]
return
<result>
{ft:highlight-field-matches($article, 'title')}
{ft:highlight-field-matches($article, 'author')}
{kwic:summarize($article, <config width="40"/>)}
</result>
Displaying Facet Counts
Facet counts for the query result can be retrieved if facets are associated with an indexed parent element. Facet counts for a particular dimension are available as a map containing an entry for each facet value occurring in one or more items of the query result. The map links the facet value given as a map key with a positive count corresponding to the number of times the value occurs in the result set. Facet values with zero count are never included.
For example, we may use the following query to display the facet counts for the "keyword" dimension in our set of docbook articles:
let $result := collection("/db/articles")//db:article[ft:query(., "xml")]
let $facets := ft:facets($result, "keyword", ())
return
<table>
{
map:for-each($facets, function($label, $count) {
<tr><td>{$label}</td><td>{$count}</td></tr>
})
}
</table>
Function ft:facets
expects a sequence of nodes belonging to a
result set obtained from one or more calls to ft:query
. If the
sequence was combined from multiple expressions calling ft:query
,
the facet counts will be merged. Second parameter of ft:facets
specifies the dimension for which facet counts should be retrieved. The third
parameter should be either empty sequence or a positive integer denoting the maximum
number of facets to show. In the case it is smaller than the total number of facets,
only those with the highest counts are returned. Passing an empty sequence means
that all facet value counts should be shown. Please note that facets with a zero
occurrence count (i.e. facets not appearing anywhere in the result) are never
returned.
For hierarchical facets only the top-most facet value in the hierarchy will be
returned by default. For example, if you indexed a date facet with separate year,
month and day component, a call to ft:facets($node, "date", ())
will
return facet counts for years only. To also get counts for months, you have to call
ft:facets
with a fourth parameter, passing in the year for which
sub-facet counts should be retrieved. To get days, you also need to specify month
and so on. ft:facets($node, "date", (), ("2018", "06"))
will thus
return facet counts for all days in June 2018.
Refining a Query with Facets
The main purpose of facets is to quickly narrow down a query result, limiting it
to only items which match a certain facet value. To drill down by a given facet
dimension and value, pass a key "facets" in the options map given in the third
parameter of ft:query
:
let $options := map {
"facets": map {
"keyword": ("indexing", "facets")
}
}
return
collection("/db/articles")//db:article[ft:query(., "xml", $options)]
If you specify multiple dimensions, these will be linked together with a logical
and
, limiting the result to elements matching both
dimensions.
Treatment of multiple values for one facet dimension depends on the type of facet.
For non-hierarchical facets, as in example above, if you specify more than one value
these will be linked together with a logical or
, returning
elements matching any of the alternative facet values for that dimension.
In case of hierarchical facets, a sequence of items is interpreted as a
hierarchical value/subvalue facet path, therefore expression like ("2018",
"06", "25")
for the date dimension mentioned earlier
will return nodes from the 25th of June 2018. Nested sequences are not allowed in
XQuery, so the only way to pass in multiple hierarchical facet paths is by wrapping
the whole structure in an array. Each array element then is logically linked with
its other members with or
expression. To query for elements from
June or May 2018 we therefore need to specify date dimension
values as [("2018", "06"), ("2018", "05")]
let $options := map {
"facets": map {
"keyword": ("indexing", "facets"),
"date": [("2018", "06"), ("2018", "05")]
}
}
return
collection("/db/articles")//db:article[ft:query(., "xml", $options)]
Describing Queries in XML
Lucene's default query syntax does not provide access to all available features.
However, eXist-db's ft:query
function also accepts a description
of the query in XML, as an alternative to passing a query string. The XML
description closely mirrors Lucene's query API. It is transformed into an internal
tree of query objects, which is directly passed to Lucene for execution. This has
several advantages, for example you can specify if the order of terms should be
relevant for a phrase query:
let $query :=
<query>
<near ordered="no">miserable nation</near>
</query>
return
//SPEECH[ft:query(., $query)]
Ranged queries using TO
are also supported. Suppose you have
marked dates and wish to return only results between 1600 and 1610.
let $query := "date:[1600 TO 1610]"
return ft:search($col, $query)//exist:match
The following elements may occur within a query description:
-
<term>
-
Defines a single term to be searched in the index. If the root query element contains a sequence of term elements, wrap them in
<bool/>
and they will be combined as in a boolean "or" query. For example:let $query := <query> <bool><term>nation</term><term>miserable</term></bool> </query> return //SPEECH[ft:query(., $query)]
This finds all
<SPEECH>
elements containing eithernation
ormiserable
or both. -
<wildcard>
-
A string with a
*
wildcard in it. This will be matched against the terms of a document. Can be used instead of a<term>
element. For example:let $query := <query> <bool><term>nation</term><wildcard>miser*</wildcard></bool> </query> return //SPEECH[ft:query(., $query)]
-
<regex>
-
A regular expression which will be matched against the terms of a document. Can be used instead of a
<term>
element. For example:let $query := <query> <bool><term>nation</term><regex>miser.*</regex></bool> </query> return //SPEECH[ft:query(., $query)]
-
<bool>
-
Constructs a boolean query from its children. Each child element may have an occurrence indicator, which could be either
must
,should
ornot
:-
must
-
this part of the query must be matched
-
should
-
this part of the query should be matched, but doesn't need to
-
not
-
this part of the query must not be matched
For instance:
let $query := <query> <bool><term occur="must">boil</term><term occur="should">bubble</term></bool> </query> return //SPEECH[ft:query(LINE, $query)]
To optimize performance you can specify a minimum number of matches to prevent needless disjunctive searches, using the
min
attribute. If no occurrence indicator is provided the query will default toshould
, as this is the only indicator that supportsmin
:let $query := <query><bool min="3"><term>witch</term></bool></query> return //SPEECH[ft:query(LINE, $query)]
-
-
<phrase>
-
Searches for a group of terms occurring in the correct order. The element may either contain explicit
<term>
elements or text content. Text will be automatically tokenized into a sequence of terms. For example:let $query := <query> <phrase>cauldron boil</phrase> </query> return //SPEECH[ft:query(., $query)]
This has the same effect as:
let $query := <query> <phrase><term>cauldron</term><term>boil</term></phrase> </query> return //SPEECH[ft:query(., $query)]
The attribute
slop
can be used for a proximity search: Lucene will try to find terms which are within the specified distance:let $query := <query> <phrase slop="10"><term>frog</term><term>dog</term></phrase> </query> return //SPEECH[ft:query(., $query)]
-
<near>
-
<near>
is a powerful alternative to<phrase>
and one of the features not available through the standard Lucene query parser.If the element has text content only, it will be tokenized into terms and the expression behaves like
<phrase>
. Otherwise it may contain any combination of<term>
,<first>
and nested<near>
elements. This makes it possible to search for two sequences of terms which are within a specific distance. For example:let $query := <query> <near slop="20"><term>snake</term><near slop="1">tongue dog</near></near> </query> return //SPEECH[ft:query(., $query)]
Element
<first>
matches a span against the start of the text in the context node. It takes an optional attributeend
to specify the maximum distance from the start of the text. For example:let $query := <query> <near slop="50"><first end="2"><near>second witch</near></first><near slop="1">tongue dog</near></near> </query> return //SPEECH[ft:query(., $query)]
As shown above, the content of
<first>
can again be text, a<term>
or<near>
.Contrary to
<phrase>
,<near>
can be told to ignore the order of its components. Use parameterordered="yes|no"
to change near's behaviour. For example:let $query := <query> <near slop="100" ordered="no"><term>bubble</term><term>fillet</term></near> </query> return //SPEECH[ft:query(., $query)]
All elements in a query may have an optional boost
parameter
(float). The score of the nodes matching the corresponding query part will be
multiplied by this factor.
Additional parameters
The ft:query
function allows a third parameter for passing additional
settings to the query engine. This parameter must be an XML fragment which lists the
configuration properties to be set as child elements:
let $options :=
<options>
<query-analyzer-id>ws</query-analyzer-id>
<default-operator>and</default-operator>
<phrase-slop>1</phrase-slop>
<leading-wildcard>no</leading-wildcard>
<filter-rewrite>yes</filter-rewrite>
<lowercase-expanded-terms>yes</lowercase-expanded-terms>
</options>
return
//SPEECH[ft:query(., $query, $options)]
The meaning of those properties is as follows:
-
query-analyzer-id
-
Explicitly specifies the analyzer that should be used to process that particular query. The value provided should match the
id
attribute of ananalyzer
defined in collection.xconf. If you don't specify that property, your query will be processed using the same analyzer that was used to create the index you're querying. While this works for most cases, there are tasks that require this finer level of control. For example it is a feature of some Lucene analyzers that the parameters used for indexing a field are different from those used to query it. In such cases simply define a distinctanalyzer
(dubbed 'query analyzer') and explicitly refer to it with thequery-analyzer-id
parameter in each respective query invocation. -
filter-rewrite
-
Controls how terms are expanded for wildcard or regular expression searches. If set to
yes
, Lucene will use a filter to pre-process matching terms. If set tono
, all matching terms will be added to a single boolean query which is then executed. This may generate a "too many clauses" exception when applied to large data sets. Setting filter-rewrite toyes
avoids those issues. -
default-operator
-
The default operator with which multiple terms will be combined. Allowed values:
or
,and
. -
phrase-slop
-
Sets the default slop for phrases. If
0
, then exact phrase matches are required. Default value is0
. -
leading-wildcard
-
When set to
yes
,*
or?
are allowed as the first character of a PrefixQuery and WildcardQuery. Note that this can produce very slow queries on big indexes. -
lowercase-expanded-terms
-
An option used to set whether the terms in wildcard, prefix, fuzzy, or range queries should be automatically lower-cased or left in their original case. When set to
yes
, query terms are lower-cased (i.e., as iffn:lower-case()
were applied to the query string). Default value isno
.
Adding Constructed Fields to a Document
This feature allows to add arbitrary fields to a binary or XML document and have them indexed with Lucene. It was developed as part of the content extraction framework, to attach metadata extracted from for instance a PDF to the binary document. It works equally well for XML documents though and is an efficient method to attach computed fields to a document, containing information which does not exist in the XML as such.
With the advent of Facets and Fields) functionality it is recommended to use these instead of constructed fields.
The field indexes are not configured via collection.xconf
. Instead
we add fields programmatically from an XQuery (which could be run via a trigger):
ft:index("/db/demo/test.xml", <doc>
<field name="title" store="yes">Indexing</field>
<field name="author" store="yes">Me</field>
<field name="date" store="yes">2013</field>
</doc>)
The store
attribute indicates that the fields content should be
stored as a string. Without this attribute, the content will be indexed for search, but
you won't be able to retrieve the contents.
To get the contents of a field, use the ft:get-field
function:
ft:get-field("/db/demo/test.xml", "title")
To query this index, use the ft:search
function:
ft:search("/db/demo/test.xml", "title:indexing and author:me")
Custom field indexes are automatically deleted when their parent document is removed.
If you want to update fields without removing the document, you need to delete the old
fields first though. This can be done using the ft:remove-index
function:
ft:remove-index("/db/demo/test.xml")