One last small note based upon my experience (I warned you I didn't have much, didn't I?)... use the parser if you can. The last thing I wanted to do was spend a lot of development time working out all the scenarios....... For instance, if you're building up your clause manually, how sure are you that you parse the following correctly?
term1 and (term2 or "this is a phrase") not (term3 or (term4 and term5)) Yes, it's a simple tree structure. Yes, there are well-defined algorithms for it. I don't care. The work has already been done and is already packaged up in the jar <G>..... What I wound up doing was subclassing QueryParser, overriding the methods there that I cared about (in my case, I wanted to handle wildcards with a filter). That way, I got all the messy handling of parsing the and/or/not and grouping and got to deal with my particular issues without spending time reinventing the wheel.... None of which matters if you don't allow the user to enter their own boolean logic...... FWIW Erick
