[Xapian-discuss] refining search with PHP5

[Richard Boulton]

On Tue, Mar 24, 2009 at 05:49:48PM +0100, james cauwelier wrote:
> Hi all,
> 
> 
> I used Xapian to search a database with 1.5 million products for an online
> webshop.  We are cross referencing this with a relational database to do
> further refining which is far from optimal.  This decision was made because
> we did not have the time to investigate Xapian further.
> 
> Now we want to add more refining options, eg. by language, cover language
> and release date.  How can I know which languages are available within a
> result set?  If I index the release date, how can I know which of the
> following groups are present in my result set?
> 
> - not released
> - will be released within the next 30 days
> - released in the last 30 days
> - released more than 30 days ago
> 
> 
> I hope somebody can help me out.  I would grately appreciate it.

The easiest approach is to run the query 4 times with extra restrictions to
cover each of those cases, and check if you get any results for each.  Try
it - it might be faster than you expect!

Alternatively, there's code in the matchspy branch to look for facets which
are stored associated with items in your result set, which might help you.

With trunk (or the 1.0 release series), the only other approach that I can
think of is to get lots of result (say, the top 1000) and check their
document data (outside xapian) to see if they fall into your categories.

-- 
Richard