http://www.opensymphony.com/compass/schema/compass-core-config.xsd

<compass name="default">

<connection>
<jdbc dialect="org.apache.lucene.store.jdbc.dialect.OracleDialect">
<dataSourceProvider>
<driverManager url="jdbc:oracle:thin:@blable " username="myusername" password="mypassword"
driverClass="oracle.jdbc.driver.OracleDriver" />
</dataSourceProvider>
<fileEntries>
<fileEntry name="_default_">
<indexInput bufferSize="4096" />
<indexOutput bufferSize="4096" />
</fileEntry>
</fileEntries>
</jdbc>
</connection>
</compass>
</compass-core-config>

I've just commited a new feature (and made a release of the 0.4-SNAPSHOT version) that allows you to override the default alias with one of your choosing.

It works like this:

class MyClass {
    static searchable = {
        alias "myclass" // overrides the default alias with one you choose
        // .. other searchable mapping config if you need it
    }

    // .. properties etc
}

This should allow you to set a shorter alias than the default and therefore make the table name shorter.

Want to try it and report back?

Anyhow, now with the support to control the alias name, they can put an obscure name if they choose to.

That was reason for choosing the silly generated alias we have now.

Now people can obfuscate the alias themselves it does make more sense to use the basic class name as the default alias again.

But personally I prefer to have exclude-alias-from-all on by default, and provide an option to turn it off, so for the sake of consistency in plugin search results I would prefer to implement the two together.

Away from the plugin I've used Compass searchable-constants for this, and that has the additional benefit that you can can choose some other string, even an obfuscated one if you like.

The plugin supports searchable-constants internally but does not expose an API yet but it could be as simple as:

class City {
    static searchable = {
        constant "location"
        // other contstants and config
    }
    // ...
}

so that would work across the whole index like searchableService.search("+location +paris").

Cities are a nice example actually. Consider a large database of cities and then a search for "new york city": with exclude-alias-from-all turned off it returns many irrelevant results.

I've tended to avoid having the alias as part of the searchable data so as to try to make search results as relevant as possible.

I guess we both have our own differing opinions about this But I'm happy to let the users decide - shall we take it to the mailing list?

Exposing the constant config option should be trivial.

Lets take it to the mailing list, and I will post a blog post asking as well. If people are for excluding the alias by default, I can add it as a Compass default as well.

And I couldn't resist implementing the "constants" feature already: http://jira.codehaus.org/browse/GRAILSPLUGINS-260

You can install the 0.5-SNAPSHOT from http://svn.codehaus.org/grails-plugins/grails-searchable/branches/0_5/grails-searchable-0.5-SNAPSHOT.zip

but note that it is Java 5 only until I wrap up the 0.4.1 release

The documentation for defining the sub-index in the searchable closure is here http://grails.org/Searchable+Plugin+-+Mapping#SearchablePlugin-Mapping-MappingDSL