Querying: Suggestions

RavenDB has an indexing mechanism built upon the Lucene engine which has a great suggestions feature. This capability 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 appear as follows:

public class Products_ByName extends AbstractIndexCreationTask {
    public Products_ByName() {
        map = "from product in docs.Products " +
            "select new " +
            "{ " +
            "  product.Name " +
            "} ";

        index("Name", FieldIndexing.SEARCH); // (optional) splitting name into multiple tokens
        suggestion("Name");// configuring suggestions
    }
}

Product product = session
    .query(Product.class, Products_ByName.class)
    .search("Name", "chaig")
    .firstOrDefault();

If our database has Northwind samples deployed then it will not return any results. However, we can ask RavenDB for help:

Map<String, SuggestionResult> suggestionResult = session
    .query(Product.class, Products_ByName.class)
    .suggestUsing(builder -> builder.byField("Name", "chaig"))
    .execute();

System.out.println("Did you mean?");

for (String suggestion : suggestionResult.get("Name").getSuggestions()) {
    System.out.println("\t" + suggestion);
}

from index 'Products/ByName' 
select suggest('Name', 'chaig')

It will produce these suggestions:

Did you mean?
    chang
    chai

Suggest Over Multiple Words

RavenDB allows you to perform a suggestion query over multiple words.

SuggestionOptions options = new SuggestionOptions();
options.setAccuracy(0.4f);
options.setPageSize(5);
options.setDistance(StringDistanceTypes.JARO_WINKLER);
options.setSortMode(SuggestionSortMode.POPULARITY);

Map<String, SuggestionResult> resultsByMultipleWords = session
    .query(Product.class, Products_ByName.class)
    .suggestUsing(builder ->
        builder.byField("Name", new String[]{"chaig", "tof"})
            .withOptions(options))
    .execute();

System.out.println("Did you mean?");

for (String suggestion : resultsByMultipleWords.get("Name").getSuggestions()) {
    System.out.println("\t" + suggestion);
}

This will produce the following results:

Did you mean?
    chai
    chang
    chartreuse
    chef
    tofu

Remarks