Java Search API on DataStore

[Raunak Gupta]

I'm slightly confused - can the Java Search API (for full text search) be used on Google Cloud DataStore, do so I need to use a different storage option? If I can, do I use the Objectify library, or is there a different library I should use?

- Raunak

[Anastasios Hatzis]

I don't know if the Objectify library supports Search API documents., but Search API and Datastore are two different services, although it can be very useful to combine them.

Search API allows your app to define a search index (for example: "BlogComments"), and then insert search documents to the index, where each document consists of fields such as "authorName", "topic", "body" etc. Then your app can search the index for documents that match the search query (e.g. all comments with a certain word in "body").

Typically, the search documents only reflect data that is stored somewhere else, e.g. as entities in Datastore, because you want to apply advanced text search features that are not available in the original storage. For example, in Datastore you can not perform queries for partial strings. Or querying files in Google Cloud Storage through the API is only rudimentary.

On 31 May 2016 at 00:40, Raunak Gupta <rauna...@gmail.com> wrote:

I'm slightly confused - can the Java Search API (for full text search) be used on Google Cloud DataStore, do so I need to use a different storage option? If I can, do I use the Objectify library, or is there a different library I should use?

- Raunak

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[Nick]

Search and datastore are distinct. You will need to create a document in the search API for anything you want to search for, even if stored in the datastore. Objectify doesn't deal with search at all.

The thundr GAE module provides a DAO/repository abstraction that coordinates search and ofy writes and searches, I don't know of any other Java based search abstraction.

I would recommend investigating the search APIs limitations before investing heavily in integrating it - it may be less comprehensive than you might assume.

Main limitations are:
Only uses dates (not times)
Can't store longs naturally
Only provides basic stemming
Numeric comparisons can exhibit slightly odd behavior for very near values
Geo search doesn't work in devserver
Consistency constraints are basically undefined

You may be better served based on your requirement to look at elastic search or similar on GCE/GKE/Saas

[Raunak Gupta]

I was mainly looking to provide AutoComplete functionality, but it seems to me I might be better off using Algolia or ElasticSearch instead. 

[Nick]

If you want autocomplete from the start of the word/phrase you can do that with the datastore alone and a basic string query.

If you want it from mid phrase, neither datastore or search API are particularly great at this (you need to store all fragments yourself)

Algolia will have you up and running in no time, and it's crazy fast