Suggestions

RavenDB indexing mechanism in built upon Lucene engine that has a great suggestions feature. This capability has been also introduced to RavenDB and allows a significant improvement of search functionalities enhancing the overall user experience of the application.

Let's consider an example where the users have the option to look for products by their name. The index and query would look as follow:

public class Products_ByName : AbstractIndexCreationTask<Product>
{
	public Products_ByName()
	{
		Map = products => from product in products
						  select new
							{
								product.Name
							};

		Indexes.Add(x => x.Name, FieldIndexing.Analyzed);	// (optional) splitting name into multiple tokens
		Suggestion(x => x.Name);				// configuring suggestions
	}
}

IQueryable<Product> query = session
	.Query<Product, Products_ByName>()
	.Where(x => x.Name == "chaig");

Product product = query.FirstOrDefault();

If our database have Northwind samples deployed then it will not return any results, but we can ask RavenDB for help by using:

if (product == null)
{
	SuggestionQueryResult suggestionResult = query.Suggest();

	Console.WriteLine("Did you mean?");

	foreach (string suggestion in suggestionResult.Suggestions)
	{
		Console.WriteLine("\t{0}", suggestion);
	}
}

It will produce the suggestions:

Did you mean?
    chang
    chai

The Suggest method is an extension contained in Raven.Client namespace. It also has an overload that takes one parameter - SuggestionQuery that allows you to specify the suggestion query options:

• Field - the name of the field that you want to find suggestions in,
• Term - the provided by user search term,
• MaxSuggestions - the number of suggestions to return (default: 15),
• Distance - the enum that indicates what string distance algorithm should be used: JaroWinkler, Levenshtein (default) or NGram,
• Accuracy - the minimal accuracy required from a string distance for a suggestion match (default: 0.0),
• Popularity - determines whether the returned terms should be in order of popularity (default: false).

session
	.Query<Product, Products_ByName>()
	.Suggest(
		new SuggestionQuery
		{
			Field = "Name",
			Term = "chaig",
			Accuracy = 0.4f,
			MaxSuggestions = 5,
			Distance = StringDistanceTypes.JaroWinkler,
			Popularity = true
		});

store
	.DatabaseCommands
	.Suggest(
		"Products/ByName",
		new SuggestionQuery
		{
			Field = "Name",
			Term = "chaig",
			Accuracy = 0.4f,
			MaxSuggestions = 5,
			Distance = StringDistanceTypes.JaroWinkler,
			Popularity = true
		});

public class Products_ByName : AbstractIndexCreationTask<Product>
{
	public Products_ByName()
	{
		Map = products => from product in products
						  select new
							{
								product.Name
							};

		Indexes.Add(x => x.Name, FieldIndexing.Analyzed);	// (optional) splitting name into multiple tokens
		Suggestion(x => x.Name);				// configuring suggestions
	}
}

Suggest over multiple words

RavenDB allows you to perform a suggestion query over multiple words. In order to use this functionalify you have to pass words that you are looking for in Term by using special RavenDB syntax (more details here):

SuggestionQueryResult resultsByMultipleWords =
	session
	.Query<Product, Products_ByName>()
	.Suggest(new SuggestionQuery
	{
		Field = "Name",
		Term = "<<chaig tof>>",
		Accuracy = 0.4f,
		MaxSuggestions = 5,
		Distance = StringDistanceTypes.JaroWinkler,
		Popularity = true,
	});

Console.WriteLine("Did you mean?");

foreach (string suggestion in resultsByMultipleWords.Suggestions)
{
	Console.WriteLine("\t{0}", suggestion);
}

This will produce the results:

Did you mean?
    chai
    chang
    chartreuse
    chef
    tofu

Remarks