Hi everyone, We have a collection of companies that we have included in typesense, specifically dentists. Each client has a different contact_date for each dentist. I’m curious if there is any best practice for handling this kind of field that is different for each company, but wanting to filter/sort by it for each user. One way I could potentially do this is by adding a different schema field per client:

{
  "name": "ABC Company",
  "location": "San Francisco",
  "latest_contact_date_client_1": "2023-05-04T10:30:00Z",
  "latest_contact_date_client_2": "2023-05-04T10:30:00Z",
  ...
}

But that seems terribly inefficient.

Is the end goal to let clients search for dentists and allow them to filter based on their last contact date for each dentist?

exactly

I would recommend creating one main collection with all dentists… And then when a client contacts a dentist, create a new user-specific collection called say

dentists_contacted_by_client_1

and add that dentist record into that collection. Then at search time, you can do a request and fetch results from the user-specific collection sorted by contact time, then do another request to the main collection excluding the IDs for in the first result set

Thanks @Jason Bosco. How would that work though if we are then filtering using other fields as well? I also worry a little a bit about making that search, since we would need to pass in an extremely large filter_by string to exclude all of the ids, which can be hundreds of thousands of Documents.

since we would need to pass in an extremely large filter_by string to exclude all of the ids, which can be hundreds of thousands of Documents.

A client can contact hundreds of thousands of dentists?

A client represents an organization with a sales team, which as a team can contact hundreds of thousands of businesses.

Ah I see…

yea, i’m not sure what is considered reasonable… I’m happy to change our data structure in the future, trying to figure out what would be a good solution for the short to mid term (probably up to 1000 organizations or so)

Nested fields should be fine for now…

oh awesome, i love that