Couchbase Mobile iOS

Full text search support

Details

  • Type: New Feature New Feature
  • Status: Open Open
  • Priority: Major Major
  • Resolution: Unresolved
  • Affects Version/s: None
  • Fix Version/s: None
  • Component/s: None
  • Labels:
    None

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Benjamin Young added a comment -
Why not just make this ticket "full text support"? Is clucene an option? Are there other full-text search projects for iOS that might work?

I think the major concern with the "full text support" feature is not that we don't have it (as we do in the form of couchdb-lucene), but that the implementation limits the portability (due to it's requiring Java, currently).

Whatever we build needs to be compatible across all devices, so search functionality doesn't have to be (re)written based on which Couchbase product it's using. If SQLite FTS3 gets us that, great! :) We should then also make tickets with this exact title in the other product issues lists. If we can't, we should go back to the drawing board and generalize this ticket's title to just "add full text support."

Thanks for starting this discussion, though, Chris.
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Benjamin Young added a comment - Why not just make this ticket "full text support"? Is clucene an option? Are there other full-text search projects for iOS that might work? I think the major concern with the "full text support" feature is not that we don't have it (as we do in the form of couchdb-lucene), but that the implementation limits the portability (due to it's requiring Java, currently). Whatever we build needs to be compatible across all devices, so search functionality doesn't have to be (re)written based on which Couchbase product it's using. If SQLite FTS3 gets us that, great! :) We should then also make tickets with this exact title in the other product issues lists. If we can't, we should go back to the drawing board and generalize this ticket's title to just "add full text support." Thanks for starting this discussion, though, Chris.
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Jens Alfke added a comment -
Updated the title to be less specific. SQLite's indexing code still sounds promising (even if it's not already compiled into iOS), but other implementations are worth looking at too.
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Jens Alfke added a comment - Updated the title to be less specific. SQLite's indexing code still sounds promising (even if it's not already compiled into iOS), but other implementations are worth looking at too.
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A J added a comment -
FWIW, my iOS 5 app used SQLite FTS for search across 150MB+ worth of complex PDFs as attachments in a Couch. Querying SQLite FTS works great - fast and easy.

What was hard was indexing the PDFs in the first place.

I hacked up a proof of concept (more a non-proof) using some PSPDFKit, some CG classes and some SQLite to index PDFs *on the device* but it was a non-starter. Very slow to index large PDFs.

What I ended up doing was writing an OS X app and using some Automator actions to grab the text from the PDFs and create a SQLite DB ready to go for search. Worked fine.

This gels with some of my enterprise-y doc management projects in the past - creating a truly good index is both hard and slow.

So, conclusions: If you've got a SQLite FTS index ready to go your're golden. Creating one on the device for more than a trivial amount of content is highly problematic.

Not sure that that all helps :)
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A J added a comment - FWIW, my iOS 5 app used SQLite FTS for search across 150MB+ worth of complex PDFs as attachments in a Couch. Querying SQLite FTS works great - fast and easy. What was hard was indexing the PDFs in the first place. I hacked up a proof of concept (more a non-proof) using some PSPDFKit, some CG classes and some SQLite to index PDFs *on the device* but it was a non-starter. Very slow to index large PDFs. What I ended up doing was writing an OS X app and using some Automator actions to grab the text from the PDFs and create a SQLite DB ready to go for search. Worked fine. This gels with some of my enterprise-y doc management projects in the past - creating a truly good index is both hard and slow. So, conclusions: If you've got a SQLite FTS index ready to go your're golden. Creating one on the device for more than a trivial amount of content is highly problematic. Not sure that that all helps :)

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  • Assignee:
    J Chris Anderson
    Reporter:
    J Chris Anderson
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    Updated: