JavaScript Client's Return of Highlights Inquiry

Hey everyone, what’s the reasoning behind the javascript client returning highlights in an array instead of an object:

"hits": [
        {
          "highlights": [
            {
              "field": "company_name",
              "snippet": "<mark>Stark</mark> Industries"
            }
          ],
          "document": {
            "id": "124",
            "company_name": "Stark Industries",
            "num_employees": 5215,
            "country": "USA"
          }
        }
]

Would the highlights ever include more than one highlight per field?

"highlights": [
            {
              "field": "content",
              "snippet": "<mark>Hawaii</mark> is the big wave island."
            },
            {
              "field": "content",
              "snippet": "for the <mark>Hawaii</mark> surf competition."
            }
          ],

This makes the frontend code a lot more complex as you need to parse the array and see if the field matches:

PSEUDO CODE

temp = result.highlights.filter(el => { 
   if el.field === my-field-name 
})

if temp.length === 0
// print highlight

// if temp.length > 1
// print first instance or list all highlights for this field

// else print document.content

However if the highlights was returned as an object it would be a lot easier on the frontend:

<p>{{ result.highlights.content ?? result.document.content }}</p>

> Would the highlights ever include more than one highlight per field?

When you are querying multiple fields, each matching field is highlighted.

I mean specifically for the same field. I don’t mind if “title, synopsis, content” all have highlights… but would content ever have two highlights if its a long document?

No only one highlight per field. I think we chose this format because a dictionary did not work well in statically typed languages in a nested structure.

For instance this would be the preferred response to make things easier in Javascript:

      "hits": [
        {
          "highlights": {
              "company_name": {
                  "snippet": "<mark>Stark</mark> Industries",
                  ...
              },
              "content": {
                  "snippet": "<mark>Hawaii</mark> is the big wave island.",
                  ...
              },
          },
          "document": {
            "id": "124",
            "company_name": "Stark Industries",
            "num_employees": 5215,
            "country": "USA"
          }
        }
      ]
    }

You could write a helper function that converts the array of highlights to a hashmap of field_name -> highlight

Yeah, just wondering what the reasoning was… I thought maybe it was a speed thing to make the server faster and offload work to the frontend

I remember running into a specific issue with statically typed languages where we need to define the types of the JSON structures for the parsing.

Okay no worries, I’m going to keep playing with it. I’ve been testing MeiliSearch too but we found they had an issue searching for the word *Ho-oponopono* in my documents so I’m quite impressed that Typesense finds it.

Glad to hear 🙂 Let me know if you run into any gotchas. And what we can do to improve Typesense further.