Examine Documentation

What is Examine?

Examine allows you to index and search data easily and wraps the Lucene.Net indexing/searching engine. Lucene is super fast and allows for very fast searching even on very large amounts of data. Examine is very extensible and allows you to configure as many indexes as you like and each may be configured individually. Out of the box Examine gives you a Lucene based index implementation as well as a Fluent API that can be used to search for your data.

Examine is installed via Nuget: https://www.nuget.org/packages/Examine

Conceptual Documentation

Conceptual documentation is available.

Tip: There are many unit tests in the source code that can be used as Examples of how to do things. There is also a test web project that has plenty of examples of how to configure indexes and search them.

Minimum requirements

Examine Version .NET
V2 .NET Standard 2.0
V1 .NET Framework 4.5.2

Quick Start

Examine V2

Tip: IExamineManager is the gateway to working with examine. It is registered in DI as a singleton and can be injected into your services._

  1. Install

    > dotnet add package Examine --version 2.1.0

  2. Configure Services and create an index

    
// Adds Examine Core services
services.AddExamine();

// Create a Lucene based index
services.AddExamineLuceneIndex("MyIndex");

  3. Populate the index

    // Add a "ValueSet" (document) to the index 
// which can contain any data you want.
myIndex.IndexItem(new ValueSet(
    Guid.NewGuid().ToString(),  //Give the doc an ID of your choice
    "MyCategory",               //Each doc has a "Category"
    new Dictionary<string, object>()
    {
        {"Name", "Frank" },
        {"Address", "Beverly Hills, 90210" }
    }));

  4. Search the index

    // Create a query
var results = myIndex.Searcher.CreateQuery()
    .Field("Address", "Hills")        // Look for any "Hills" addresses
    .Execute();                       // Execute the search

Examine V1

Tip: IExamineManager is the gateway to working with examine. It can be registered in DI as a singleton or can be accessed via ExamineManager.Instance._

  1. Install

    PM> Install-Package Examine -Version 1.2.2

  2. Create an index

    public void CreateIndexes(IExamineManager examineManager)
{
    //Create and add a new index to the manager
    var myIndex = examineManager.AddIndex(
        new LuceneIndex(            // Create a Lucene based index
            "MyIndex",              // Named MyIndex
            new SimpleFSDirectory(  // In a location of your choice
                new DirectoryInfo("C:\\TestIndexes"))));
}

  3. Populate the index

    // Add a "ValueSet" (document) to the index 
// which can contain any data you want.
myIndex.IndexItem(new ValueSet(
    Guid.NewGuid().ToString(),  //Give the doc an ID of your choice
    "MyCategory",               //Each doc has a "Category"
    new Dictionary<string, object>()
    {
        {"Name", "Frank" },
        {"Address", "Beverly Hills, 90210" }
    }));

  4. Search the index

    var searcher = myIndex.GetSearcher(); // Get a searcher
var results = searcher.CreateQuery()  // Create a query
    .Field("Address", "Hills")        // Look for any "Hills" addresses
    .Execute();                       // Execute the search