#community-help

Effective Document Deletion Strategies in Typesense

TLDR Adrian asked about deleting potentially non-existent documents. Pantelis suggested using IDs for document deletion or queries within delete function. Adrian decided to use query-based deletions.

4mo

Join the chat

Aug 08, 2023 (4 months ago)

Photo of md5-27ff63286c7b3dcb91085f39e910c437

Adrian

02:29 PM

If I want to delete a document that may or may not exist. Would you suggest explicitly checking for the Could not find a document with id: error and treating that as a non error case, or is there a better way to do so? Perhaps deleting by query would be a better approach

Photo of md5-cf30cea0b09568543ab6a67633468f77

Pantelis

02:32 PM

what i did is i assigned an id to each document so i can query it by id and delete it or check if it exists. Checking by error seems to be dangerous in the sense that maybe tomorrow the error can change to something else.

Adrian

02:38 PM

Good idea. When you say query for it do you mean a search query or the retrieve endpoint? I presumed the retrieve endpoint could have the same issue

Pantelis

02:43 PM

typesenseClient.collection('your-collection').documents.delete('your-document-id')
If it is not found then i am catching the error. The delete accepts idOrQuery. So if you have assigned an id before in each of your documents then typesense will find it and delete it. When i want to delete a set of documents i use a query inside delete, for instance: delete('submitted:=true') which is going to find all the submitted documents in your schema and delete them

Adrian

02:47 PM

I see. Thanks for the input!

02:47

Adrian

02:47 PM

I think I will go with the approach of deleting by query for all documents

Pantelis

02:48 PM

yw, whatever suits your case better! 🙂

Typesense

Lightning-fast, open source search engine for everyone | Knowledge Base powered by Struct.AI

Indexed 3011 threads (79% resolved)

Join Our Community

Similar Threads

Deleting Documents from Typesense Cloud and Version Upgrade

Masahiro asked how to remove documents from Typesense. Kishore Nallan clarified it varies by version and suggested upgrading from 0.20 to 0.22. Masahiro agreed to test this.

25mo

Deleting and Creating Documents in Typesense

Priyank asked for help with deleting and creating documents in Typesense and found the problem to be an issue with their own code. Jason offered support.

10mo

Deleting All Documents in Typesense Collection

Vikas wanted to delete all documents in a typesense collection. Kishore Nallan suggested using a range filter on a numerical field to match and delete the entire dataset.

32mo