Ferret talk - Feb 2007 - [AAF] Determine matching field in a search result

I was wondering if it was possible to determine which field caused the
match to occur (or contributed the most to the score) in a search
result.

For example, if I had a record

{ :name => ''pumpkin'', :age => -5, :address =>
''Via Mandriola'' }

and I did a search for ''Mandriola'', is it possible for
acts_as_ferret to
tell me that the match actually came from the :address field? In some
cases there will be several matching fields, but I feel it should be
possible.

Thank you :)

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On Fri, Feb 09, 2007 at 02:05:48PM +0100, pumpkin wrote:
> I was wondering if it was possible to determine which field caused the
> match to occur (or contributed the most to the score) in a search
> result.
> 
> For example, if I had a record
> 
> { :name => ''pumpkin'', :age => -5, :address =>
''Via Mandriola'' }
> 
> and I did a search for ''Mandriola'', is it possible for
acts_as_ferret to
> tell me that the match actually came from the :address field? In some
> cases there will be several matching fields, but I feel it should be
> possible.
I know of no way to do this via Ferret''s API, so aaf doesn''t
support
this either. You can run explain on a query, but that more or less does
the searching again and generates a textual output that shows how the
score has been calculated.

However, if you only want to know which field the hit came from, just do
a search for "+id:#{record.id} +address:#{query}" and repeat that for
every other field you have indexed. If you call total_hits and not
find_by_contents with these queries and check if the result is 0 or 1,
this even should be quite fast.

Jens

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