Hibernate Search Tools 1.0.0.Alpha Release

I'm glad to announce the first release of the Eclipse plugin for Hibernate Search. In this post I want to describe its features and ask you for any comments, positive or (even more important for me) negative.

Installation

The plugin was made as a feature of jbosstools-hibernate plugin, which can be downloaded and installed on its own or together with the full JBoss Tools distribution. After that you can install the Hibernate Search plugin via Eclipse Marketplace. All the requirements, such as eclipse version and platform support, are listed in the link.

In order to work with hibernate search you have to set hibernate.search.default.directory_provider and hibernate.search.default.indexBase properties. See Getting started with Hibernate Search. 

Functionality

The plugin was thought to be some kind of a Luke tool inside Eclipse. It was thought to be more convenient than launching a separate application, and picks up the configuration directly from your Hibernate configuration

Three options were added to the console configurations: Index rebuild, Explore documents and Try analysers.

Index rebuild

When introducing Hibernate Search in an existing application, you have to create an initial Lucene index for the data already present in your database. The option "Rebuild index" will do so by creating index in the directory, specified by hibernate.search.default.indexBase property.

Explore documents

After creating the initial index you can now watch the created Lucene documents. All entities, annotated as "Indexed" are displayed in the Lucene Documents tab. Tick the needed checboxes and and load the documents. Move between the documents using arrows.

Try analysers

The "try analyzers" instrument allows you to view the result of work of different Lucene Analyzers, The combo box contains all classes in the workspace, which extend org.apache.lucene.analysis.Analyzer, including created by the user. While you type the text you want to analyse, the result immediately appears in the AnalysisResultTab view.

Possible issues

One problem which you might have is that "Index rebuild" option seems to do nothing. As a temporary workaround try to set the "hibernate.search.autoregister_listeners" property to "true" explicitly the hibernate configuration xml file.

If you have any other problems, such as unexpected behaviour, strange windows with exceptions or any errors in the Error log view feel free to contact me directly anywhere or just create an issue in the plugin github page.

Plans

1) Make options "Index rebuild" and "Explore documents" available not only for configurations, but for concrete entities under session factory.

2) Make Lucene Documents view more comfortable to use and add there more features from Luke tool, for example, the ability to search over documents.

3) Increasing stability of the plugin and implementing your suggestions =)