NAME¶
Lucy::Docs::Tutorial::QueryObjects - Use Query objects instead of query strings.
DESCRIPTION¶
Until now, our search app has had only a single search box. In this tutorial
chapter, we'll move towards an "advanced search" interface, by
adding a "category" drop-down menu. Three new classes will be
required:
- •
- QueryParser - Turn a query string into a Query object.
- •
- TermQuery - Query for a specific term within a specific field.
- •
- ANDQuery - "AND" together multiple Query objects to produce an
intersected result set.
Adaptations to indexer.pl¶
Our new "category" field will be a StringType field rather than a
FullTextType field, because we will only be looking for exact matches. It
needs to be indexed, but since we won't display its value, it doesn't need to
be stored.
my $cat_type = Lucy::Plan::StringType->new( stored => 0 );
$schema->spec_field( name => 'category', type => $cat_type );
There will be three possible values: "article", "amendment",
and "preamble", which we'll hack out of the source file's name
during our "parse_file" subroutine:
my $category
= $filename =~ /art/ ? 'article'
: $filename =~ /amend/ ? 'amendment'
: $filename =~ /preamble/ ? 'preamble'
: die "Can't derive category for $filename";
return {
title => $title,
content => $bodytext,
url => "/us_constitution/$filename",
category => $category,
};
Adaptations to search.cgi¶
The "category" constraint will be added to our search interface using
an HTML "select" element (this routine will need to be integrated
into the HTML generation section of search.cgi):
# Build up the HTML "select" object for the "category" field.
sub generate_category_select {
my $cat = shift;
my $select = qq|
<select name="category">
<option value="">All Sections</option>
<option value="article">Articles</option>
<option value="amendment">Amendments</option>
</select>|;
if ($cat) {
$select =~ s/"$cat"/"$cat" selected/;
}
return $select;
}
We'll start off by loading our new modules and extracting our new CGI parameter.
use Lucy::Search::QueryParser;
use Lucy::Search::TermQuery;
use Lucy::Search::ANDQuery;
...
my $category = decode( "UTF-8", $cgi->param('category') || '' );
QueryParser's constructor requires a "schema" argument. We can get
that from our IndexSearcher:
# Create an IndexSearcher and a QueryParser.
my $searcher = Lucy::Search::IndexSearcher->new(
index => $path_to_index,
);
my $qparser = Lucy::Search::QueryParser->new(
schema => $searcher->get_schema,
);
Previously, we have been handing raw query strings to IndexSearcher. Behind the
scenes, IndexSearcher has been using a QueryParser to turn those query strings
into Query objects. Now, we will bring QueryParser into the foreground and
parse the strings explicitly.
my $query = $qparser->parse($q);
If the user has specified a category, we'll use an ANDQuery to join our parsed
query together with a TermQuery representing the category.
if ($category) {
my $category_query = Lucy::Search::TermQuery->new(
field => 'category',
term => $category,
);
$query = Lucy::Search::ANDQuery->new(
children => [ $query, $category_query ]
);
}
Now when we execute the query...
# Execute the Query and get a Hits object.
my $hits = $searcher->hits(
query => $query,
offset => $offset,
num_wanted => $page_size,
);
... we'll get a result set which is the intersection of the parsed query and the
category query.
Congratulations!¶
You've made it to the end of the tutorial.
SEE ALSO¶
For additional thematic documentation, see the Apache Lucy Cookbook.
ANDQuery has a companion class, ORQuery, and a close relative,
RequiredOptionalQuery.