Is it possible to store files in Apache Lucene?

Question

I'm new in Apache Lucene.

Is it possible to store files (e.g. pdf, doc) in Apache Lucene and later on to retrieve it? Or if i have to store those files somewhere else and just use it for indexing?

Answer 1

Technically you can, of course, store the contents of a file (e.g. in the StoredField or elsewhere) but I don't see any reason why you should. This will simply bring no added value but pain while serializing and deserializing file contents - and you will still have to keep the file name indexed somewhere else. Apart from serialization/deserialization pain, your app will likely have to block longer while Lucene will be merging index segments.

The best approach IMO is to store the path to the file relative to some file repository root - e.g. if your file is in /home/users/bob/files/123/file.txt, you might want to store the files/123/file.txt part without tokenization (using StringField).