Issues with lucene 4.10.0 on android

[David Linde <da...@gmail.com>]

Hi,

Background: My company has built an Android application that utilizes
Lucene 4.7.0 to index and search upon a fairly static set of about 100,000
documents. We have used numerous versions of Lucene over the years, and
they have all worked well to accomplish this purpose.

Issue: Upon upgrading to Lucene 4.10.0, the application’s functionality
broke. As it turns out, an exception named
“java.nio.file.NoSuchFileException” is now utilized within the
DirectoryReader class. This exception class is not available within the
Android runtime, and the Dalvik VM crashes with an “unable to resolve
exception” error every time a DirectoryReader tries to open.

Possible Solutions: This problem could be remedied by replacing the usage
of “java.nio.file.NoSuchFileException” with “java.io.FileNotFoundException”
or simply an IOException. The suspect code exists in the “listCommits”
method of “DirectoryReader.”
try {
    sis.read(dir, fileName);
} catch (NoSuchFileException | FileNotFoundException var10) {
    sis = null;
}

Is this something you would consider changing to make it compatible with
android?

Thanks in Advance,

David

RE: Issues with lucene 4.10.0 on android

[Uwe Schindler <uw...@thetaphi.de>]

Hi
 
> Background: My company has built an Android application that utilizes
> Lucene 4.7.0 to index and search upon a fairly static set of about 100,000
> documents. We have used numerous versions of Lucene over the years, and
> they have all worked well to accomplish this purpose.
> 
> Issue: Upon upgrading to Lucene 4.10.0, the application’s functionality broke.
> As it turns out, an exception named “java.nio.file.NoSuchFileException” is
> now utilized within the DirectoryReader class. This exception class is not
> available within the Android runtime, and the Dalvik VM crashes with an
> “unable to resolve exception” error every time a DirectoryReader tries to
> open.

Lucene 4.8+ changed from Java 6 to Java 7 as minimum requirement. With this move, we initially changed the NIOFSDirectory and MMapDirectory Directory implementations to use Java 7's NIO2 to open index files (https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/LUCENE-4848). The NIO2 API allows better error handling (see also https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/LUCENE-5945). This better error handling use a more fine-granular exception handling with more informative errors if something goes wrong. So you *have* to use the new Exception types, otherwise you would break error handling. In 4.8, 4.9 and 4.10, Lucene's NIOFSDirectory and MMapDirectory implementations use NIO2 internally, so the new Exception types like NoSuchFileException are needed here.

> Possible Solutions: This problem could be remedied by replacing the usage of
> “java.nio.file.NoSuchFileException” with “java.io.FileNotFoundException”
> or simply an IOException. The suspect code exists in the “listCommits”
> method of “DirectoryReader.”
> try {
>     sis.read(dir, fileName);
> } catch (NoSuchFileException | FileNotFoundException var10) {
>     sis = null;
> }
> 
> Is this something you would consider changing to make it compatible with
> android?

Sorry, no step backwards. Instead, we went one step further: In Lucene 5.0 - the version coming after 4.10.x - we did a complete cutover to NIO2, so all stuff around java.io.File is now forbidden APIs and are no longer used in Lucene (see https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/LUCENE-5945). Everything in Lucene now uses java.nio.file.Path and java.nio.file.Files APIs (including virtual file systems).

Changing this Exception catch block to remove this exception would not help you, because you would get another error later, because NIO2 is missing on Android (as far as I know). Android is only partially Java 7 syntax compatible, but not API compatible at all - no APIs of Java 7 were implemented yet. They seem to be mostly compatible to Java 6, so you can only use Lucene 4.7.x with Android (no guarantees!!!)
 
> Thanks in Advance,
> 
> David

Uwe


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