I would like to use Lucene's term dictionary as a randomly addressable, lexically sorted repository. A mouthful I know.... I want to be able to access terms as if I had loaded all terms using IndexReader.terms(context); iterating all terms and storing their text sequentially, in sorted order, in a Vector collection. But instead of using the vector loading approach, I want to reference the index terms where they exist in the dictionary and individually reference them by their position, (TermInfosReader.get(int position) leads me to believe this might be possible). The primary need for this arises where I have a virtual listbox and I have thousands upon thousands of terms that I need to load into the lisbox. A standard listbox is usually populated by accepting literal strings items - this works but is slow, slow, slow. A virtual listbox allows me to define the existence of 1,000,000 items, but without pre-loading the items; when it is time to show a slice of the1,000,000 items, a request is sent to me to return strings items for a range of positions.
>From above, I have the following questions: 1) Does the dictionary truly contain the terms in sorted order ? 2) Has this random/position term issue already been solved? 3) is TermInfosReader the right approach? It's use seems to involve internal, non-public APIs - any suggestions on its use ? 3) I am using the Lucene compound file format rather than multifile; I've looked at TermInfosReader and it appears to work with multfile indexes only. Is this true? Your help is truly appreciated! Regards, Sam.
