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Fulltext indexes
Indexes for full-text split strings into words that you can then search for
Introduction to Fulltext Indexes
A fulltext index can be used to find words, or prefixes of words inside documents.
A fulltext index can be defined on one attribute only, and will include all words contained in documents that have a textual value in the index attribute. The index will also include words from the index attribute if the index attribute is an array of strings, or an object with string value members.
For example, given a fulltext index on the translations attribute and the following
documents, then searching for лиса using the fulltext index would return only the
first document. Searching for the index for the exact string Fox would return the first
two documents, and searching for prefix:Fox would return all three documents:
{ translations: { en: "fox", de: "Fuchs", fr: "renard", ru: "лиса" } }
{ translations: "Fox is the English translation of the German word Fuchs" }
{ translations: [ "ArangoDB", "document", "database", "Foxx" ] }Note that deeper nested objects are ignored. For example, a fulltext index on
translations would index Fuchs, but not fox, given the following document
structure:
{ translations: { en: { US: "fox" }, de: "Fuchs" } }If you need to search across multiple fields and/or nested objects, you may write all the strings into a special attribute, which you then create the index on (it might be necessary to clean the strings first, e.g. remove line breaks and strip certain words).
If the index attribute is neither a string, an object or an array, its contents will not be indexed. When indexing the contents of an array attribute, an array member will only be included in the index if it is a string. When indexing the contents of an object attribute, an object member value will only be included in the index if it is a string. Other data types are ignored and not indexed.
Word tokenization is performed using the word boundary analysis provided by ICU , which takes the selected server language into account.
Words are indexed in all lower-case. Only words with a (specifiable) minimum length are indexed.
Accessing Fulltext Indexes from the Shell
Ensures that a fulltext index exists:
collection.ensureIndex({ type: "fulltext", fields: [ "field" ], minLength: minLength })
Creates a fulltext index on all documents on attribute field.
Fulltext indexes are implicitly sparse: all documents which do not have
the specified field attribute or that have a non-qualifying value in their
field attribute will be ignored for indexing.
Only a single attribute can be indexed. Specifying multiple attributes is unsupported.
The minimum length of words that are indexed can be specified via the
minLength parameter. Words shorter than minLength characters will
not be indexed. minLength has a default value of 2, but this value might
be changed in future versions of ArangoDB. It is thus recommended to explicitly
specify this value.
In case that the index was successfully created, an object with the index details is returned.
db.example.ensureIndex({ type: "fulltext", fields: [ "text" ], minLength: 3 });
db.example.save([
{ text : "the quick brown", b : { c : 1 } },
{ text : "quick brown fox", b : { c : 2 } },
{ text : "brown fox jumps", b : { c : 3 } },
{ text : "fox jumps over", b : { c : 4 } },
{ text : "jumps over the", b : { c : 5 } },
{ text : "over the lazy", b : { c : 6 } },
{ text : "the lazy dog", b : { c : 7 } }
]);
db._query("FOR document IN FULLTEXT(example, 'text', 'quick') RETURN document").toArray();Fulltext AQL Functions
Fulltext AQL functions are detailed in Fulltext functions.