Introduction#

Deleting documents from a Lucene index is easy when you have a primary key field in your document (like in traditional SQL databases).

However, sometimes deleting a number of documents based on multiple fields in the document is what you need. The Lucene API allows you to achieve this by specifying a query to use for deletion.

To do this, pick the right Analyzer, construct the query, pass the query to the indexWriter to delete the documents.

Syntax#

1. indexWriter.deleteDocuments(multiTermQuery);
2. Query multiTermQuery = new QueryParser("", analyzer).parse(“field_name1:“field value 1” AND field_name2:“field value 2"");
3. BooleanQuery multiTermQuery = new BooleanQuery(); multiTermQuery.add(new TermQuery(new Term(“field_name1”, “field value 1”)), BooleanClause.Occur.MUST); multiTermQuery.add(new TermQuery(new Term(“field_name2”, “field value 2”)), BooleanClause.Occur.MUST);

Remarks#

Caveats with the Choice of Analyzer

It’s not immediately obvious, but the analyzer that you are using makes a huge difference to the way your query is run. This is because the StandardAnalyzer filters out common English words like “the” and “a”. You might want to pick a different analyzer (like KeywordAnalyzer) so that it matches exactly. This obviously depends on you application of Lucene of course.

Choice of Analyzer

First of all, watch out which analyzer you are using. I was stumped for a while only to realise that the StandardAnalyzer filters out common words like ‘the’ and ‘a’. This is a problem when your field has the value ‘A’. You might want to consider the KeywordAnalyzer:

See this post around the analyzer.

// Create an analyzer:
// NOTE: We want the keyword analyzer so that it doesn't strip or alter any terms:
// In our example, the Standard Analyzer removes the term 'A' because it is a common English word.
// https://stackoverflow.com/a/9071806/231860
KeywordAnalyzer analyzer = new KeywordAnalyzer();

Query Parser

Next, you can either create your query using the QueryParser:

See this post around overriding the default operator.

// Create a query parser without a default field in this example (the first argument):
QueryParser queryParser = new QueryParser("", analyzer);

// Optionally, set the default operator to be AND (we leave it the default OR):
// https://stackoverflow.com/a/9084178/231860
// queryParser.setDefaultOperator(QueryParser.Operator.AND);

// Parse the query:
Query multiTermQuery = queryParser.parse("field_name1:\"field value 1\" AND field_name2:\"field value 2\"");

Query API

Or you can achieve the same by constructing the query yourself using their API:

See this tutorial around creating the BooleanQuery.

BooleanQuery multiTermQuery = new BooleanQuery();
multiTermQuery.add(new TermQuery(new Term("field_name1", "field value 1")), BooleanClause.Occur.MUST);
multiTermQuery.add(new TermQuery(new Term("field_name2", "field value 2")), BooleanClause.Occur.MUST);

Delete the Documents that Match the Query

Then we finally pass the query to the writer to delete documents that match the query:

See the answer to this question.

See the API here

// Remove the document by using a multi key query:
// https://www.avajava.com/tutorials/lessons/how-do-i-combine-queries-with-a-boolean-query.html
indexWriter.deleteDocuments(multiTermQuery);