Conditional Searching

[ItsRobbAllen]

Here's the scenario I am working with

A Unit is an abstract class from which we have a handful of concrete implementations (Project, Location, etc). Often, the client doesn't know information about the Unit, but they know something about the Company (which itself is an abstract class that also has several concrete implementations) that owns the Unit.

I have indexes for both Units & Companies that uses WhereEntityIs to cover all types since they all share the same underlying fields.

When a client searches, they are saying "Find me any unit that matches this search criteria and find me all units that belong to any companies that match the search criteria."

Every Unit has a reference to its CompanyId as there are too many units to store directly in the company record.

The code I have is as follows

var searchTerm = $"*Acme*";

var companyQuery = session.Query<Company>("Companies/SearchAllTypes")
    .Search(c => c.Name, searchTerm)
    .Search(c => c.Address.StreetAddress1, searchTerm)
    .Search(c => c.Address.StreetAddress2, searchTerm)
    .Search(c => c.Address.City, searchTerm);


var unitQuery = session.Query<Unit>("Units/SearchAllTypes")
    .Search(c => c.Name, searchTerm)
    .Search(c => c.Address.StreetAddress1, searchTerm)
    .Search(c => c.Address.StreetAddress2, searchTerm)
    .Search(c => c.Address.City, searchTerm)
    .Search(c => c.Number, searchTerm)
    .Search(u => u.CompanyId, companyQuery.Select(c => c.Id));

This works fine if the companyQuery returns any companies, but fails with Cannot search on empty searchTerms array. if there aren't any matches.

It really isn't a huge deal to execute the companyQuery & then modify the unitQuery if we get records back, but I'm trying to figure out if this can be done in a single trip to Raven.

[ayende]

Well, to start with, what is the logic of .Search(u => u.CompanyId, companyQuery.Select(c => c.Id)); ?

You are doing full text search on the company id? Why no use .In(u => u.CompanyId, companyQuery.Select(c => c.Id));

That said, if you are searching by all of them in this manner, is there a reason not to have a single index covering both of them?
See: https://ayende.com/blog/152833/orders-search-in-ravendb

public class UnitsSearch : AbstractMultiMapIndexCreationTask
{
    public UnitsSearch()
    {
           AddMapForAll<UnitBase>(units => 
              from u in units select new { 
                  Query = new [] { 
                            u.Name, 
                            u.Address.StreetAddress1, 
                           u.Address.StreetAddress2, 
                           u.Address.City, 
                           u.Number, 
                           u.CompanyId
           });
    }

}

The above will search just on orders, but you can then apply that with LoadDocument to search on units by the related Company details.

[ItsRobbAllen]

Let's say there's 2 companies - Rhino Tours (companies/1-A) and Raven Construction (companies/2-A)

Rhino Tours owns 25 units, Raven has 3

One of the units, Tasty-Treats (units/123-A), owned by Raven is located on 3417 Rhino Way

A search for rhino will give me companies/1-A matched on the company name and therefore I should get all 25 units that are part of companies/1-A AND units/123-A since the unit's address is also matched.

A search for tasty would not match any companies but it would match units/123-A directly. In this case, using an In would return nothing since no company ids were found, and that's not what we need.

We actually find companies by several other criteria as well, such as contacts and various other bits of information, so there are several searches performed, but in the end they all just return a list of company ids so I simplified my code example above to not confuse matters.

Does that make sense?

[ayende]

The question is, what it is that you are trying to find. That is units, no?
Because it looks like you want to do the search term applied on both companies and units at the same time, no?

In that case, can't you have an index like the one above, with the fields you want to search UnitsQuery and CompanyQuery and then your query will be:

from index UnitsCompaniesSearch where search(UnitsQuery, $searchTerm) and search(CompanyQuery, $searchTerm)

At which point you'll have matches only for those that have both matches in units & company.

Using your example, you'll have a search for Rhino you'll get those that are in the company, but need something more to match the units, no?

Or you can use boosting on the CompanyQuery field to make it weight more. In general, that is likely to be more relevant if this is a search scenario. So you won't do filtering, but boosting based on how close that is to what you want.

A search on Rhino should first find units for Rhino Tours but also the Rhino Way unit (but last in the list) ?

[ItsRobbAllen]

At which point you'll have matches only for those that have both matches in units & company.

That's the thing - I don't want units that have matches in both, I want units in either.

"Show me all units that match the search criteria OR units that belong to companies that match the search criteria"

[ayende]

So, that would be:

from index UnitsCompaniesSearch where search(UnitsQuery, $searchTerm) OR search(CompanyQuery, $searchTerm)

No?

[ayende]

Note that I'm using OR here.