3.3. Sharing indexes (two entities into the same directory)

Note

This is only presented here so that you know the option is available. There is really not much benefit in sharing indexes.

It is technically possible to store the information of more than one entity into a single Lucene index. There are two ways to accomplish this:

Configuring the underlying directory providers to point to the same physical index directory. In practice, you set the property hibernate.search.[fully qualified entity name].indexName to the same value. As an example let’s use the same index (directory) for the Furniture and Animal entity. We just set indexName for both entities to for example “Animal”. Both entities will then be stored in the Animal directory
```
hibernate.search.org.hibernate.search.test.shards.Furniture.indexName = Aninal hibernate.search.org.hibernate.search.test.shards.Animal.indexName = Aninal
```
Setting the @Indexed annotation’s index attribute of the entities you want to merge to the same value. If we again wanted all Furniture instances to be indexed in the Animal index along with all instances of Animal we would specify @Indexed(index=”Animal”) on both Animal and Furniture classes.