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Schemas

A schema is the definition of how a document, and the fields it contains, are stored and indexed. For instance, use schemas to define:

which string fields should be treated as full text fields.
which fields contain numbers, dates, or geolocations.
which fields should be indexed globally.
custom rules to control the typing for dynamically added fields.

Field Types

Each field has a data type which can be:

a simple type like text, string, keyword, datetime, float or boolean.
a sub-type which supports the hierarchical nature of JSON such as object or array.
or a specialised type like geospatial.

You can read more about field types here.

Field types do not need to be defined before being used. Thanks to dynamic typing, new field names will be added automatically, just by indexing a document. New fields can be added both to the top-level and to inner object and nested fields.

The dynamic typing rules can be configured to customize the type that is used for new fields.

You can read more about dynamic typing here.

Explicit Types

You know more about your data than Xapiand can guess, so while dynamic typing can be useful to get started, at some point you will want to specify your own explicit types.

You can create field types when you create an index, and you can add fields to an existing index with the Create Index API.

You can read more about explicit types here.

Casting Types

This section is a work in progress…

Accuracy

This section is a work in progress…

Indexing Mode

Indexing mode defines what parts of the documents are indexed and how.

You can read more about this mode here.

Metadata

Schemas can have custom meta data associated with it.

You can read more about meta data here.

Dynamic Field Names

Some times, field names are dynamic (e.g. every new document could be adding a different name for a field). In these cases, Dynamic Field Names make it so such field names do not add a new concrete field to the schema; and instead all those are added as if it was a single shared field.

You can read more about dynamic field names here.

Namespaces

Similarly to Dynamic Field Names, Namespaces reuse the field type, but these also allow nested field names to be added and searched.

You can read more about namespaces here and here.

Foreign Schemas

When explicitly used, Foreign Schemas can establish where the schema information will be stored. For example, when a set of indices all share the same schema it’d be beneficial to have a single shared schema. This can be accomplished by setting the foreign schema of all such indexes to point to a document containing the schema.

You can read more about Foreign Schemas here.

Updating Existing Field Types
Other than where documented, existing field types cannot be updated. Changing the name or the type of a field would mean invalidating already indexed documents. Instead, you should create a new index with the correct field types and reindex your data into that index.

One Index, One Document Type
In Xapiand, one index can contain one document type. E.g. Instead of storing two document types in a single index, one should store tweets in the tweets index and users in the users index. Indices are completely independent of each other and so there will be no conflict of field types between indices.

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