creating mahout vector from record

Hi All,
I am using Mahout first time and I want to use Canopy clustering
algorithm. I want to cluster similar records.

Each record consists of both string and numeric values. To convert a
record into a Vector, I am assigning each record, a unique record id and
creating vector with that record id.
When comparing distance between vectors, I am fetching corresponding
records for that record ids in the distance measure function and
calculating distance.

Are there any approaches in Mahout to convert this kind of records into
mahout vectors. If so, please point me.