Collections

In Typesense, a group of related documents is called a collection. A collection is roughly equivalent to a table in a relational database.

Create a collection

When a collection is created, we give it a name and describe the fields that will be indexed from the documents that are added to the collection.

From Typesense v0.20, we can also create a collection that automatically detects the types of the various fields in the document.

With pre-defined schema

Let's first create a collection with an explicit, pre-defined schema.

TIP

Your documents can contain other fields not mentioned in the collection's schema - they will be stored on disk but not indexed in memory.

Sample Response

Definition

POST ${TYPESENSE_HOST}/collections

Field Arguments

Parameter	Required	Description
name	yes	Name of the collection you wish to create. This can be a simple string like "name": "score". Or you can also use a RegEx to specify field names matching a pattern. For eg: if you want to specify that all fields starting with score_ should be an integer, you can set name as "name": "score_.*".
fields	yes	A list of fields that you wish to index for querying, filtering and faceting. For each field, you have to specify the name and type. Declaring a field as optional A field can be declared as optional by setting "optional": true. Declaring a field as a facet A field can be declared as a facetable field by setting "facet": true. Faceted fields are indexed verbatim without any tokenization or preprocessing. For example, if you are building a product search, color and brand could be defined as facet fields. Declaring a field as non-indexable You can ensure that a field is not indexed by setting "index": false. This is useful when used along with auto schema detection.
default_sorting_field	no	The name of an int32 / float field that determines the order in which the search results are ranked when a sort_by clause is not provided during searching. This field must indicate some kind of popularity. For example, in a product search application, you could define num_reviews field as the default_sorting_field. Additionally, when a word in a search query matches multiple possible words (either because of a typo or during a prefix search), this parameter is used to rank such equally matching tokens. For e.g. both "john" and "joan" are 1-typo away from "jofn". Similarly, in a prefix search, both "apple" and "apply" would match the prefix "app".

Field types

Typesense allows you to index the following types of fields:

string

int32

int64

float

bool

You can define an array or multi-valued field by suffixing a [] at the end:

string[]

int32[]

int64[]

float[]

bool[]

There are also two special field types that are used for handling data sources with varying schema via automatic schema detection.

auto

string*

With auto schema detection

While we encourage the use of a schema to ensure that you index only the fields that you need, it's not always possible to know upfront what fields your documents might contain.

In such a scenario, you can define a wildcard field with the name .* and type auto to let Typesense automatically detect the type of the fields automatically.

When a .* field is defined this way, all the fields in a document are automatically indexed for searching and filtering.

TIP

Faceting is not enabled for a wildcard field, i.e., {"name": ".*" , ...} since that can consume a lot of memory, especially for large text fields. However, you can still explicitly define specific fields to facet by setting facet: true for them. For e.g. {"name": ".*_facet", "facet": true" }.

You can still define the schema for certain fields explicitly:

If an explicit definition is available for a field (country in this example), Typesense will give preference to that before falling back to the wildcard definition.

When such an explicit field definition is not available, the first document that contains a field with a given name determines the type of that field. For example, if you index a document with a field named title and it is a string, then the next document that contains the field named title will be expected to have a string too.

Data Coercion

What happens when the next document's title field is not a string? By default, Typesense will try to coerce the value to the previously inferred type. For example, if you sent a number, Typesense will "stringify" the number and store it as a string. However, this may not always work (you can't convert a string to a number). When Typesense is unable to coerce the field value to the previously inferred type, the indexing will fail with the appropriate error.

TIP

You can control this default coercion behavior at write-time with the dirty_values parameter.

Retrieve a collection

Retrieve the details of a collection, given its name.

Sample Response

Definition

GET ${TYPESENSE_HOST}/collections/:collection

List all collections

Returns a summary of all your collections. The collections are returned sorted by creation date, with the most recent collections appearing first.

Sample Response

Definition

GET ${TYPESENSE_HOST}/collections

Drop a collection

Permanently drops a collection. This action cannot be undone. For large collections, this might have an impact on read latencies.

Sample Response

Definition

DELETE ${TYPESENSE_HOST}/collections/:collection