#community-help

Solving Searchable String ID Sorting Issue

TLDR Mubashirullah needed to sort by string id, which was not supported. Kishore Nallan offered a preview Docker build with the feature. Mubashirullah expressed satisfaction with the solution.

25mo

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Dec 23, 2021 (25 months ago)

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Mubashirullah

07:58 AM

Hi everyone.
I have this situation where I need to add id as searchable_id string since the client needs to search by it. But then, I have to add the id again as sort_id int so I can sort by it. I wish I could use my normal id for searching as well

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Kishore Nallan

07:58 AM

Is your id integer or string type?

Mubashirullah

08:46 AM

The original is a string

Kishore Nallan

09:11 AM

We don't support sorting by string, but that feature is almost ready for preview.

Mubashirullah

09:19 AM

🙂 Looking forward to it. Otherwise, I'd have to convert every string into an int and that would really bloat my memory.

Dec 24, 2021 (25 months ago)

Kishore Nallan

01:28 PM

Mubashirullah I've a preview Docker build for the string sorting feature.

Mubashirullah

01:29 PM

Great news! My manager will be happy to hear this.

Kishore Nallan

01:29 PM

You can check against typesense/typesense:0.23.0.rc10

You should explicitly enable string sorting at a field level like this:

{"name": "title", "type": "string", "sort": true }

You can now include the title field in the sort_by clause.

01:30

Kishore Nallan

01:30 PM

Caveat: enabling string sorting will require more memory because as Typesense is an in-memory engine, the strings have to be now stored in-memory.

01:31

Kishore Nallan

01:31 PM

Compared with the text index, which is an inverted index of word -> document IDs, a string sorting datastructure has to store the verbatim strings, so there is little de-duplication so will consume more memory. Best to be used for small strings (anyway sorting large strings don't make much sense).

Mubashirullah

01:34 PM

🙂❤️🎉

Kishore Nallan

01:40 PM

Let me know your feedback if you test it out 🙂

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