[hibernate-dev] Search: how to define hints for batch indexing

Hi everyone, I am working on batch indexing for Hibernate Search, I would like to define a new annotation to set the needed "hints" for the process "@BatchIndexingHints"; one of the hint parameters is "which HQL query should I use?" The query is optional and I can fallback to a simple scrolling criteria, also this query should not affect the functionality, only a performance hint to define join fetch collections needed for indexing. The options we found (speaking with Emmanuel) are 4: 1)don't ask for a query but for the name of a named query. I don't like this one as the definition of a named query is too flexible, e.g. I know for sure the "readonly=true" is preferable for my purpose. Also this query is going to be created only once per thread during an indexing process, so I don't foresee a considerable performance boost. Additionally the name of the NamedQuery would be redundant as I would be the only user (probably). 2)define the HQL to load all entities in @BatchIndexingHints. 3)Let the user only define a list of Strings, naming the properties to be eagerly loaded; I would add these using .setFetchMode("prop1", FetchMode.EAGER) on the base Criteria. This would be nice as we could be sure the users can't add some restriction or load the wrong entity, making it more safe. But I wonder if we are loosing too much flexibility in this case. 4)don't tell anything at class level put add a boolean to desired fields, something like @Field(eagerInBatch=true) or @Field(InBatch=FetchType.EAGER) (adding a property to existing annotation) Besides the eagerly loading query the other parameters are 3 ints needed to set the size of 3 different ThreadPools which do the job at different stages; they are here to provide a nice per-entity default, but if I move them to a configuration property and we select option 4) I could avoid the new annotation. some comments? Sanne