Re: sorting in SolrIndexSearcher

[Yonik Seeley]

On 10/20/06, Peter Keegan <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:

I'm looking at the following code from SolrIndexSearcher.getDocListNC:

      final FieldSortedHitQueue hq = new FieldSortedHitQueue(reader,
lsort.getSort(), offset+len);
      searcher.search(query, new HitCollector() {
        public void collect(int doc, float score) {
          if (filt!=null && !filt.exists(doc)) return;
          numHits[0]++;
          hq.insert(new FieldDoc(doc, score));
        }
      }
      );
      totalHits = numHits[0];
      maxScore = totalHits>0 ? hq.getMaxScore() : 0.0f;
      nDocsReturned = hq.size();
      ids = new int[nDocsReturned];
      scores = (flags&GET_SCORES)!=0 ? new float[nDocsReturned] : null;
      for (int i = nDocsReturned -1; i >= 0; i--) {
        FieldDoc fieldDoc = (FieldDoc)hq.pop();
        // fillFields is the point where score normalization happens
        // hq.fillFields(fieldDoc)
        ids[i] = fieldDoc.doc;
        if (scores != null) scores[i] = fieldDoc.score;
      }

Why are the document IDs and scores being retrieved from the
PriorityQueue in reverse order? I'm missing something obvious.

The PriorityQueue allows you to find the *smallest* element in it in
log(N) time, not the largest, so we need to retrieve smallest to
largest.  But since we want the highest score first, we traverse the
array in reverse order, putting the smallest in the last position and
the largest in the first.

-Yonik