How will I go about indexing a customer using Lucene

Question

I have a web application which stores customers usernames, emails and phone numbers. I want customers to search for other users using email, phone or username for a start just to understand the whole lucene concept. then later on i will add functionality to search within a user an item he posts. I am following this example on www.lucenetutorial.com/lucene-in-5-minutes.html

public class HelloLucene {
  public static void main(String[] args) throws IOException, ParseException {
    // 0. Specify the analyzer for tokenizing text.
    //    The same analyzer should be used for indexing and searching
    StandardAnalyzer analyzer = new StandardAnalyzer(Version.LUCENE_40);

    // 1. create the index
    Directory index = new RAMDirectory();

    IndexWriterConfig config = new IndexWriterConfig(Version.LUCENE_40, analyzer);

    IndexWriter w = new IndexWriter(index, config);
    addDoc(w, "Lucene in Action", "193398817");
    addDoc(w, "Lucene for Dummies", "55320055Z");
    addDoc(w, "Managing Gigabytes", "55063554A");
    addDoc(w, "The Art of Computer Science", "9900333X");
    w.close();

    // 2. query
    String querystr = args.length > 0 ? args[0] : "lucene";

    // the "title" arg specifies the default field to use
    // when no field is explicitly specified in the query.
    Query q = new QueryParser(Version.LUCENE_40, "title", analyzer).parse(querystr);

    // 3. search
    int hitsPerPage = 10;
    IndexReader reader = DirectoryReader.open(index);
    IndexSearcher searcher = new IndexSearcher(reader);
    TopScoreDocCollector collector = TopScoreDocCollector.create(hitsPerPage, true);
    searcher.search(q, collector);
    ScoreDoc[] hits = collector.topDocs().scoreDocs;

    // 4. display results
    System.out.println("Found " + hits.length + " hits.");
    for(int i=0;i<hits.length;++i) {
      int docId = hits[i].doc;
      Document d = searcher.doc(docId);
      System.out.println((i + 1) + ". " + d.get("isbn") + "\t" + d.get("title"));
    }

    // reader can only be closed when there
    // is no need to access the documents any more.
    reader.close();
  }

  private static void addDoc(IndexWriter w, String title, String isbn) throws IOException {
    Document doc = new Document();
    doc.add(new TextField("title", title, Field.Store.YES));

    // use a string field for isbn because we don't want it tokenized
    doc.add(new StringField("isbn", isbn, Field.Store.YES));
    w.addDocument(doc);
  }
}

I want new customers to be added to index automatically on registration. customerId is timestamp. so should i add a new document for each field on the customers details or should i concatenate all fields into a string and add as a single document? Please go easy on me I am really new.

Answer 1

This is a good place to start with Lucene indexing mechanism http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/library/wa-lucene/

In the bottom line when lucene index the document, it first converts it into lucene document form. This lucene document comprises of set of fields and each field is a set of terms. Term are nothing but stream of bytes.

The document which is to be index to pass to analyzer which forms these terms out of it, and these terms keywords which are match during searching process.

When we perform a search process the query is analyzed through the same analyzer and then is match against the terms. So you dont have to create a document for each field, rather you should create a single document for each user.