A Stateful Filter That Works Across Index Segments
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                 Key: LUCENE-2506
                 URL: https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/LUCENE-2506
             Project: Lucene - Java
          Issue Type: Improvement
            Reporter: Karthick Sankarachary


By design, Lucene's Filter abstraction is applied once per segment in the index 
during searching. In particular, the reader provided to its #getDocIdSet method 
does not represent the whole underlying index. In other words, if the index has 
more than one segment the given reader only represents a single segment. 

As a result, that definition of the Filter suffers from a limitation in that it 
does not have the ability to permit/prohibit documents in the search results 
based on the terms residing in not just the current segment but also the ones 
that came before it during the search. 

To address this limitation, we introduce here a StatefulFilter which 
specifically builds on the Filter class so as to make it capable of remembering 
terms in segments spanning the whole
underlying index. To reiterate, the need for making filters stateful stems from 
the fact that some, although not most, filters care about what terms they may 
have come across in prior segments. It does so by keeping track of the past 
terms from prior segments in a cache that is maintained in a StatefulTermsEnum 
instance on a per-thread basis.

Note that we leave it up to the concrete sub-class of the stateful filter to 
decide what to remember in its state or what not to. In other words, it can 
choose to remember as much or as little from prior segments as it desires. In 
keeping with the TermsEnum interface, which the StatefulTermsEnum class builds 
on, it must let the searcher know what terms to accept and which ones to skip 
over. More often than not, the state of the filter will come in handy while 
implementing that very acceptance logic. 

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