Documents

Every record you index in Typesense is called a Document.

Index documents

A document to be indexed in a given collection must conform to the schema of the collection.

If the document contains an id field of type string, Typesense will use that field as the identifier for the document. Otherwise, Typesense will assign an auto-generated identifier to the document. Since it's a special field, the id field is not required to be defined as part of the collection schema.

NOTE

The id should not include spaces or any other characters that require encoding in urls (opens new window).

Index a single document

If you need to index a document in response to some user action in your application, you can use the single document create endpoint.

If you need to index multiple documents at a time, we highly recommend using the import documents endpoint, which is optimized for bulk imports. For eg: If you have 100 documents, indexing them using the import endpoint at once will be much more performant than indexing documents one a time.

Let's see how we can add a new document to a collection.

Upsert a single document

We can also replace a document with the same id if it already exists, or create a new document if one doesn't already exist with the same id.

If you need to upsert multiple documents at a time, we highly recommend using the import documents endpoint with action=upsert, which is optimized for bulk upserts. For eg: If you have 100 documents, upserting them using the import endpoint at once will be much more performant than upserting documents one a time.

Sample Response

Definition

POST ${TYPESENSE_HOST}/collections/:collection/documents

Index multiple documents

You can index multiple documents in a batch using the import API.

When indexing multiple documents, this endpoint is much more performant, than calling the single document create endpoint multiple times in quick succession.

The documents to import need to be formatted as a newline delimited JSON string, aka JSONLines (opens new window) format. This is essentially one JSON object per line, without commas between documents. For example, here are a set of 3 documents represented in JSONL format.

{"id": "124", "company_name": "Stark Industries", "num_employees": 5215, "country": "US"}
{"id": "125", "company_name": "Future Technology", "num_employees": 1232, "country": "UK"}
{"id": "126", "company_name": "Random Corp.", "num_employees": 531, "country": "AU"}

If you are using one of our client libraries, you can also pass in an array of documents and the library will take care of converting it into JSONL.

You can also convert from CSV to JSONL and JSON to JSONL before importing to Typesense.

Action modes (create, upsert, update & emplace)

Besides batch-creating documents, you can also use the action query parameter to update documents using their id field.

create (default)	Creates a new document. Fails if a document with the same id already exists
upsert	Creates a new document or updates an existing document if a document with the same id already exists. Requires the whole document to be sent. For partial updates, use the update action below.
update	Updates an existing document. Fails if a document with the given id does not exist. You can send a partial document containing only the fields that are to be updated.
emplace	Creates a new document or updates an existing document if a document with the same id already exists. You can send either the whole document or a partial document for update.

Let's see how we can now use the create mode to import some documents.

Definition

POST ${TYPESENSE_HOST}/collections/:collection/documents/import

Sample Response

Each line of the response indicates the result of each document present in the request body (in the same order). If the import of a single document fails, it does not affect the other documents.

If there is a failure, the response line will include a corresponding error message and as well as the actual document content. For example, the second document had an import failure in the following response:

NOTE

The import endpoint will always return a HTTP 200 OK code, regardless of the import results of the individual documents.

We do this because there might be some documents which succeeded on import and others that failed, and we don't want to return an HTTP error code in those partial scenarios. To keep it consistent, we just return HTTP 200 in all cases.

So always be sure to check the API response for any {success: false, ...} records to see if there are any documents that failed import.

TIP

Here are some tips when importing data into Typesense.

Returning the id of the imported documents

If you want the import response to return the ingested document's id in the response, you can use the return_id parameter.

# Makes the import response return the `id` field of imported documents in the response
curl -H "X-TYPESENSE-API-KEY: ${TYPESENSE_API_KEY}" -X POST --data-binary @documents.jsonl \
'http://localhost:8108/collections/companies/documents/import?return_id=true'
{"success": true, "id": "0"}
{"success": true, "id": "1"}
...

Likewise, using the return_doc parameter will return the entire document back in response.

Configure batch size

By default, Typesense ingests 40 documents at a time into Typesense - after every 40 documents are ingested, Typesense will then service the search request queue, before switching back to imports. To increase this value, use the batch_size parameter.

Note that this parameter controls server-side batching of documents sent in a single import API call. Increasing this value might affect search performance, so we'd recommend that you not change the default unless you really need to. You can also do client-side batching, by sending your documents over multiple import API calls (potentially in parallel).

NOTE: Larger batch sizes will consume larger transient memory during import.

Dealing with Dirty Data

The dirty_values parameter determines what Typesense should do when the type of a particular field being indexed does not match the previously inferred type for that field, or the one defined in the collection's schema.

This parameter can be sent with any of the document write API endpoints, for both single documents and multiple documents.

Value	Behavior
coerce_or_reject	Attempt coercion of the field's value to previously inferred type. If coercion fails, reject the write outright with an error message.
coerce_or_drop	Attempt coercion of the field's value to previously inferred type. If coercion fails, drop the particular field and index the rest of the document.
drop	Drop the particular field and index the rest of the document.
reject	Reject the document outright.

Default behaviour

If a wildcard (.*) field is defined in the schema or if the schema contains any field name with a regular expression (e.g a field named .*_name), the default behavior is coerce_or_reject. Otherwise, the default behavior is reject (this ensures backward compatibility with older Typesense versions).

Indexing a document with dirty data

Let's now attempt to index a document with a title field that contains an integer. We will assume that this field was previously inferred to be of type string. Let's use the coerce_or_reject behavior here:

Similarly, we can use the dirty_values parameter for the update, upsert and import operations as well.

Indexing all values as string

Typesense provides a convenient way to store all fields as strings through the use of the string* field type.

Defining a type as string* allows Typesense to accept both singular and multi-value/array values.

Let's say we want to ingest data from multiple devices but want to store them as strings since each device could be using a different data type for the same field name (e.g. one device could send an record_id as an integer, while another device could send an record_id as a string).

To do that, we can define a schema as follows:

{
  "name": "device_data",
  "fields": [
    {"name": ".*", "type": "string*" }
  ]
}

Now, Typesense will automatically convert any single/multi-valued data into their corresponding string representations automatically when data is indexed with the dirty_values: "coerce_or_reject" mode.

You can see how they will be transformed below:

Import a JSONL file

You can import a JSONL file or you can import the output of a Typesense export operation directly as import to the import end-point since both use JSONL.

Here's an example file:

You can import the above documents.jsonl file like this.

Import a JSON file

If you have a file in JSON format, you can convert it into JSONL format using jq (opens new window):

jq -c '.[]' documents.json > documents.jsonl

Once you have the JSONL file, you can then import it following the instructions above to import a JSONL file.

Import a CSV file

If you have a CSV file with column headers, you can convert it into JSONL format using mlr (opens new window):

mlr --icsv --ojsonl cat documents.csv > documents.jsonl

Once you have the JSONL file, you can then import it following the instructions above to import a JSONL file.

Import other file types

Typesense is primarily a JSON store, optimized for fast search. So if you can extract data from other file types and convert it into structured JSON, you can import it into Typesense and search through it.

For eg, here's one library you can use to convert DOCX files to JSON (opens new window).

Apache Tika (opens new window) is another library to extract text and metadata from PDF, PPT, XLS and over a 1000 different file formats.

Once you've extracted the JSON, you can then index them in Typesense just like any other JSON file.

Retrieve a document

Fetch an individual document from a collection by using its id.

Sample Response

Definition

GET ${TYPESENSE_HOST}/collections/:collection/documents/:id

Update documents

Typesense allows you to update a single document, multiple documents, or documents that match a particular filter_by query.

Update a single document

We can update a single document from a collection by using its id. The update can be partial, as shown below:

Sample Response

Definition

PATCH ${TYPESENSE_HOST}/collections/:collection/documents/:id

Update multiple documents

To update multiple documents, use the import endpoint with action=update, action=upsert or action=emplace.

Update by query

To update all documents that match a given filter_by query:

Sample Response

Definition

PATCH ${TYPESENSE_HOST}/collections/:collection/documents

Delete documents

Delete a single document

Delete an individual document from a collection by using its id.

Sample Response

Definition

DELETE ${TYPESENSE_HOST}/collections/:collection/documents/:id

Delete by query

You can also delete a bunch of documents that match a specific filter_by condition:

Use the batch_size parameter to control the number of documents that should deleted at a time. A larger value will speed up deletions, but will impact performance of other operations running on the server.

Sample Response

Definition

DELETE ${TYPESENSE_HOST}/collections/:collection/documents?filter_by=X&batch_size=N

TIP

To delete multiple documents by ID, you can use filter_by=id: [id1, id2, id3].

To delete all documents in a collection, you can use a filter that matches all documents in your collection. For eg, if you have an int32 field called popularity in your documents, you can use filter_by=popularity:>0 to delete all documents. Or if you have a bool field called in_stock in your documents, you can use filter_by=in_stock:[true,false] to delete all documents.

Export documents

Export documents in a collection in JSONL format.

Sample Response

While exporting, you can use the following parameters to control the result of the export:

Parameter	Description
filter_by	Restrict the exports to documents that satisfies the filter by query.
include_fields	List of fields that should be present in the exported documents.
exclude_fields	List of fields that should not be present in the exported documents.

Definition

GET ${TYPESENSE_HOST}/collections/:collection/documents/export