BooleanQuery.add()

[Leonid Portnoy <le...@db.com>]

Hi,

The documentation for BooleanQuery.add() states : 
 
        "Adds a clause to a boolean query. Clauses may be: required which 
means that
documents which do not match this sub-query will not match the boolean 
query; prohibited which means that documents which do match this sub-query 
will not match the boolean query; or neither, in which case matched 
documents are neither prohibited from nor required to match the 
sub-query."

But, if it's neither then why add the sub-query at all? According to this, 
the presence of the sub-query should not restrict the range of documents 
returned at all, since regardless of whether the document matches the 
sub-query or not, the behavior of the super-query will be the same.

In fact, this is not the case. For example, 

BooleanQuery : 
          TermQuery(Term("dog"))    : prohibited = false, required=false
          TermQuery(Term"cat"))       : prohibited = false, required=false

returns all documents which contain either  'cat'  or 'dog', and  _only 
those_ documents. According to the documentation all documents should be 
returned, even if they contain neither 'cat' nor 'dog', since a document 
is not required to match either sub-query.

Am I misunderstanding something here, or is the documentation unclear? 

Thanks,
Leonid

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Re: BooleanQuery.add()

[Doug Cutting <cu...@apache.org>]

Leonid Portnoy wrote:
> Am I misunderstanding something here, or is the documentation unclear? 

The documentation is unclear.  Can you propose an improvement?

Doug

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