Nested Objects and Arrays in Typesense

Hello everyone 🙂
I’m planning to use Typesense, but I have nested objects and object array in my structure. I read that flatting may help me, but in this case the indexing would be tricky, so I had another idea, to split my data into different collections. But in this case I would have trouble with the pagination of the results, or I wasn’t able to found any example for this. I made this example object to reflect on my real object:

{
  "id": "random_id_1",
  "name": "John Doe",
  "read_history": [
    {
      "id": "random_book_id_1",
      "name": "Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone",
      "author": "J. K. Rowling"
    },
    {
      "id": "random_book_id_2",
      "name": "Ready Player One",
      "author": "Ernest Cline"
    }
  ],
  "favorite_books": [
    "random_book_id_2"
  ]
}

So here is an example, what I want to do. As result I want to display my readers and their favourite book names in a table, but I want to search in author names and book names as well.
In the different index idea, I planned create two indexes, first for general reader data (id, name, favorite_books) and the second would store the read history data with an extra owner_id field to connect the book document to the reader. The indexing was just fine in this case, if I ran a multi collection search I got the results in two different collections, but I want to paginate in the general reader data (and in optimal case, the book data should follow it, based on the shared id, like a SQL join) and not separately. Is there any chance I can do it with Typesense, or I have to merge (fetch and then aggregate) my objects manually?

The good news is that we've already begun working on support for nested object and nested array of objects, so that feature will be available in a few weeks time.

In the mean time, you can convert the array of objects to simple plain arrays like this:

read_history.names: ["Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone", "Ready Player One"]

read_history.authors: ["J. K. Rowling", "Ernest Cline"]

Sounds awesome! Looking forward to try it out. Thank you very much for your answer! 🙂

One last thing. Is there a ticket somewhere what I can follow to be up-to-date? I’m pretty interested to try the beta, if this is possible 😄

Yes, you can follow this issue for updates: https://github.com/typesense/typesense/issues/227

I will post on that issue when I have an early build available for testing.

Thank you very much! 🙂