How to perform a new query search on Lucene query search results

1
votes

I have this search query in Lucene

String searchVal = "+(narr:foo narr:bar)" + " +(narr:foo2 narr:bar2)" + " -(narr:foo3 narr:bar3)";
IndexReader reader = luceneUtils.getIndexReader();
IndexSearcher searcher = luceneUtils.getIndexSearcher();
Query query = new QueryParser("narr", new EnglishAnalyzer()).parse(searchVal);
TopDocs topDocs = searcher.search(query, reader.numDocs());

In the sample code above, topDocs variable holds the result set of Lucene query.

How can I create another Lucene query that searches only in documents retrieved from the previous query. i.e. How can I execute query on topDocs instead of executing it on all indexed documents?

1
javalucene

1 Answers

2
votes

A very simple way of doing this is to wrap old and new queries inside a BooleanQuery and use Occur.FILTER for the original one.

Like this:

BooleanQuery.Builder qb = new BooleanQuery.Builder();
qb.add(query, Occur.MUST);
qb.add(new QueryParser("narr", new EnglishAnalyzer()).parse("new-query"), Occur.FILTER);
Query newQuery = qb.build();

Things will get a bit more complicated if you need to perform this "query refinement" over and over. However, I don't think there's a way of searching inside a previous resultset, you need to construct a new query AFAIK.