hi TS team, i was looking over the github issue for supporting nested fields, and came across this question that very closely mirrors a nested field search use-case i'm encountering. i was just wondering if the ability to search within object arrays is supported yet? essentially, if i have a document like:

{
  "employees": [
    {
      "first_name": "John",
      "last_name": "Doe"
    },
    {
      "first_name": "John",
      "last_name": "Smith"
    }
  ]
}

can i search for an employee with

first_name

of

John

and

last_name

of

Smith

?

This is not possible to do yet, but we’re tracking demand in this issue: https://github.com/typesense/typesense/issues/828

thank you!

If you are willing to accept the search being more restrictive, you can use the

filter_by

option. To match exactly those fields and values:

filter_by: "employees.first_name:=John && employees.last_name:=Smith"

or (no

:=

)

filter_by: "employees.first_name:John && employees.last_name:Smith"

@JP Erasmus thanks for the tip. just to confirm -- that will match only documents with employees named

John Smith

? (and not, say, documents with employees

John Doe

and

Jim Smith

)

I believe it does - we are following similar logic in one of our use cases. With that said, I have only been using Typesense for ~3 weeks, so I could be wrong.

hmm, just ran a couple queries to test the

filter_by

syntax, and unfortunately it seems like it does not currently scope to values in the same object. IOW, it will consider the document

{
  "employees": [
    {
      "first_name": "John",
      "last_name": "Doe"
    },
    {
      "first_name": "Jim",
      "last_name": "Smith"
    }
  ]
}

as matching the filter

filter_by: "employees.first_name:John && employees.last_name:Smith"

I checked in more detail now and you are absolutely right. I guess it makes sense, albeit not intuitive, if this document's data is flattened to:

employees.first_name: ['John', 'Jim']
employees.last_name: ['Doe', 'Smith']

agreed. i even googled

typesense sub-document

to see if that was a thing 😃

That’s interesting to see how ES handles this! @JP Erasmus could you copy-paste your last message into the GitHub issue?

@Jason Bosco in the meantime, when flattening fields for inclusion in the index using regexes, can the field names contain spaces? if so, what is the correct query syntax? e.g.,

employees.first name.value: Jim

? or

employees.'first name'.value: Jim

?

Hmm,

employees.first name.value: Jim

should be fine, as long you’re using multi_search or if you’re using single-search and you’re URL encoding the spaces. That said, we haven’t explicitly tested for field names with spaces in them in filtering, so I wouldn’t be surprised if you run into code paths where this unaccounted for and this might cause an issue… If you notice any issues, could you open a GitHub issue with a reproducible example by cloning this gist

closing the loop here: field names with spaces seem to work just fine!

Thank you for confirming! 😅