Cloudant (IBM) Query – Indexing arrays directly using Erlang

Really short post this one on indexing using Cloudant Query to index arrays in your document, e.g. documents that have a field like this:

{
  "ids": [
    "alpha",
    "bravo",
    "charlie"
  ]
}

I was reading the documentation and just could not get it to index these items using anything but the default _all_docs indexer (don’t use this for large databases!) but then I came across the source code for Mango and hidden in the tests and the implementation was the answer I needed.

To create an index, as the documentation states, you just need to POST to /dbname/_index with something like:

{
  "type": "text",
  "index": {
    "default_analyzer": "keyword",
    "fields": [
      {"name": "ids", "type": "string"}
    ]
  }
}

However, if you try this for an array and perform a search (POST to /dbname/_find {“selector”:{“ids”:”alpha”}}) you’ll get no results! So how do you do it? Ridiculously simply, just change ids to ids.[]:

{
  "type": "text",
  "index": {
    "default_analyzer": "keyword",
    "fields": [
      {"name": "ids.[]", "type": "string"}
    ]
  }
}

The query however isn’t just “ids”: “alpha”, it’s a bit more complex, not much, but a bit: {“selector”:{“ids”:{“$elemMatch”:{“$eq”:”alpha”}}}}.

There may be a better way (without writing your own function(doc){index(“”);…}) but for now, this works and uses native Erland as opposed to Javascript.

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