Lucene trouble with indexing recurring events

Question

Hi, I'm trying to come up with a way to query dates in Lucene. Basically I have an event that has a start date, end date and can also occur regularly. The way I tried to go about it was to create an index field in Lucene that would list all the possible dates separated by a comma (or empty space would be enough, really) and than apply range search to it. The dates were indexed like this:

Event A starting on 31-10-09: "20091031"

Event B starting on 31-10-09 and lasting for 2 days: "20091031, 20091101, 20091102"

Event C recurring every Saturday for next 3 Saturdays: "20091031, 20091107, 20091114"

That however didn't work because if I was looking for events between 20091030 and 20091101, it should list events A, B and C but because B and C had some occurrences outside of the required range it did not find them.

Any idea how to solve it? Thanks

Answer 1

A possible way to do this is to create a separate document per each occurrence of every event. Both event B and C will then have three documents each, each of them having a date field and an event name field. A simple range search could then find the events.

A separate question is whether to do this in Lucene at all. Please see Search Engine versus DBMS for a discussion of related issues.