Data relationships as a context for search in Marklogic

Question

I using marklogic's search functionality to create a search page. As of right now, I'm running an XQuery to get search results through search:search. As a bare bones example, see this code:

    xquery version "1.0-ml";
import module namespace search = "http://marklogic.com/appservices/search"
        at "/MarkLogic/appservices/search/search.xqy";

search:search('test',
     <options xmlns='http://marklogic.com/appservices/search'></options>)

This search searches all content in the database, which is fine in many cases. In other cases, I search based on collections with cts:collection-query. The collections serve as great contexts for my searches.

Now, I would like to limit my search results based on a relationship of data in a "main" document. This "main" document has all the relationships in an object model. If that object model has a reference to a document, I want that document included in the search. Essentially, the "main"/model document is the context of the search.

I was trying to brainstorm some ideas of the best way to to this. Here's what I've come up with thus far, but I was hoping someone more familiar with Marklogic (I've only been working with it for 6 months) could lead me in a good direction:

1. Add all documents referenced in the model document to a unique collection. Then query search based on that collection. However, the collections would have to be updated as the model changed.
2. Load the model document into my code and get a list of all the references and add them to a query by cts:document-query (or the like).
3. Restructure my concept of a "model" somehow in my XML documents.

Thanks for any input or suggestions.

Answer 1

I would start with (2) and see if the performance is good enough. That will depend on your use-case, but I expect it should be fine for thousands or even hundreds of thousands of references.

Be sure to use a single-term cts:document-query($list-of-references). That will be faster than cts:or-query(for $ref in $list-of-references return cts:document-query($ref)), because the index lookup can be a single pass instead of N separate lookups.