I am working with the maven-indexer componentry for the first time; please forgive my ignorance.
I normally wouldn't ask these questions here, but there is no documentation. Suppose I am writing an IndexCreator implementation that wants to look at all the META-INF/MANIFEST.MF files reachable in a repository and create fields for each header found in them. (First off, is such dynamic field creation even A Thing? I am no kind of Lucene expert.) (I'm looking to allow things like "find me artifacts that contain 'fred' in their Class-Path manifest header" or any of a variety of other use cases derivable from the ability to index properties-like files inside artifact jars.) What, in this case, should my IndexCreator return from its (undocumented) getIndexerFields() method? If it's called "up front", then of course I can't return anything meaningful since I won't know the sum total of the fields my IndexCreator will contribute until the end. If it's not called up front, then maybe I'm OK. I don't actually see it being called in any meaningful way at all, but I'm sure I'm missing something, which is why I ask here. Next, I noticed that IndexerField has a getVersion() method, and from spelunking some more in the source base it seems like certain IndexCreators effectively "bump up" this version, i.e. every time a new IndexCreator comes up with new fields it does so with a new version. That suggests that perhaps I need to also get a constant added to IndexerFieldVersion, which is an enum. Can I just invent a version number here (I don't see this method called anywhere in the source base) or must I use an existing one, or…? Lastly, I see that ArtifactInfo seems to have fields in it that correspond loosely with the kinds of IndexCreators that exist (for example, it has a classNames field, which to my naive eyes is filled in by the JarFileContentsIndexCreator, suggesting that if you add a funky new IndexCreator you are obliged to add new fields to ArtifactInfo, but that coupling seems really wrong so I'm sure I'm missing something). Is that actually true? Also, the class is marked as being "phased out", but seems to be central to the notion of creating indices. Is there an alternative I should be using instead? Thanks in advance for help with these baby steps. Best, Laird
