Fulltext Search Queries

With Macrometa, the SEARCH keyword is used to filter your queries using a fulltext search view. By employing this keyword, you can:

• Filter documents based on Boolean expressions and functions in C8QL.
• Match documents that reside in different collections.
• Sort the resulting set based on how closely each document matches the search conditions.

note

Some attributes listed in this page cannot be set in the Macrometa web console.

Syntax

The SEARCH statement must be used within a FOR...IN operation. For the correct sequence, the SEARCH statement should be placed after FOR and before any additional operations.

FOR doc IN <SEARCH_VIEW_NAME>
  SEARCH <EXPRESSION> OPTIONS {…}
  ...

Replace <SEARCH_VIEW_NAME> with the name of your fulltext search view, and <EXPRESSION> with a function like:

• AND
• OR
• NOT
• ==
• <=
• >=
• <
• >
• !=
• IN (array or range), also NOT IN

Here's an example:

FOR doc IN MySearchView
  SEARCH ANALYZER(doc.text == "quick" OR doc.text == "brown", "text_en") OPTIONS { collections: ["coll1", "coll2"] }
RETURN doc

In this context, the OPTIONS {...} clause provides additional parameters to the SEARCH function, such as limiting the search to specific collections.

Limitations

The SEARCH keyword doesn't support:

• Alphabetical order
• Array comparison operators
• Inline expressions

Search Options

The SEARCH keyword can also accept the following optional attribute:

• collections (array): An array of strings with the collection names. This restricts the search to certain source collections.

If a search view is linked to three collections (coll1, coll2, and coll3), you can use the collections option to only return documents from coll1 and coll2:

FOR doc IN viewName
  SEARCH true OPTIONS { collections: ["coll1", "coll2"] }
RETURN doc

In contrast, you can use false instead of true to exclude the specified collections from your search.

Search by Document Attribute

By querying document attributes indexed in both the search view and the document collection, you can search for documents. The search result will include all attributes of the documents. However, if you query a non-indexed attribute, it will yield no results.

For example:

FOR doc IN MySearchView
  SEARCH doc.someAttr == "One"
RETURN doc

In this example, although anotherAttr is not indexed, it is returned as it's part of the document. Querying for anotherAttr directly, however, would yield no results:

FOR doc IN myView
  SEARCH doc.anotherAttr == "One"
RETURN doc

By using the includeAllFields property, you can index all fields and subfields of the source documents. However, please note that indexing all fields might increase the size of your index and potentially impact performance.

Search for Array Elements

You can search for individual elements of an array if your fulltext search view has trackListPositions set to true. Here is an example:

FOR doc IN viewName
  SEARCH doc.value.nested.deep == 2
RETURN doc

However, if trackListPositions is disabled on your search view, you must specify the position within the array of the data you want to find. For instance:

FOR doc IN viewName
  SEARCH doc.value.nested.deep[1] == 2
RETURN doc

In this example, [1] indicates that the desired result (2) is the second value in the array.

Search with SORT()

The SORT() operation allows you to retrieve documents that are not indexed by the search view. Here's an example:

FOR doc IN viewName
  SORT doc.text, doc.value DESC
RETURN doc

Additionally, the SORT() operation can also work with scoring functions to sort documents by their relevance. This, however, only works for documents that are not part of the search view's index. For example:

FOR doc IN viewName
  SEARCH ...
  SORT BM25(doc) DESC
RETURN doc