Query Language Reference

edit page

The following numeric operators are available: =, <, >, <=, >=, range(field, lower bound, upper bound)

where%20500%20%3E%3D%20price%3B

where%20range%28fieldname%2C%200%2C%205000000000L%29%3B

Numbers must be in the signed 32-bit range, or the string "Infinity"/"-Infinity". Input 64-bit signed numbers using L as suffix.

The interval is by default a closed interval. If the lower bound is exclusive, set the annotation "bounds" to "leftOpen". If the upper bound is exclusive, set the same annotation to "rightOpen". If both bounds are exclusive, set the annotation to "open".

The number operations support an extra annotation, the integer "hitLimit". This is used for capped range search. An alternative to using negative and positive values for "hitLimit" is always using a positive number of hits (as a negative number of hits do no not make much sense) and combine this with either of the boolean annotations "ascending" and "descending" (but not both). Then "[{"hitLimit": 38, "descending": true}]" would be equivalent to setting it to -38, i.e. only populate with 38 hits and start from upper boundary, i.e. descending order.

The boolean operator is: =

where%20alive%20%3D%20true%3B

The right hand side argument of the contains operator is either a string literal, or a function, like phrase.

contains is the basic building block for text matching. The kind of matching to be done depends on the field settings in the search definition.

where%20title%20contains%20%22madonna%22%3B

Fields inside structs are referenced using dot notation - e.g mystruct.mystructfield.

By default, the string will be tokenized to match the field(s) searched. Explicitly control tokenization by using annotations:

where%20title%20contains%20%28%5B%7B%22stem%22%3A%20false%7D%5D%22madonna%22%29%3B

Note the use of parentheses to control precedence.

where%20title%20contains%20%22madonna%22%20and%20title%20contains%20%22saint%22%3B

where%20title%20contains%20%22madonna%22%20or%20title%20contains%20%22saint%22%3B

where%20title%20contains%20%22madonna%22%20and%20%21%28title%20contains%20%22saint%22%29%3B

where%20text%20contains%20phrase%28%22st%22%2C%20%22louis%22%2C%20%22blues%22%29%3B

where%20text%20contains%20%28%5B%7B%22stem%22%3A%20false%7D%5D%22blues%22%29%3B

where%20text%20contains%20%28%5B%20%7B%22distance%22%3A%205%7D%20%5Dnear%28%22a%22%2C%20%22b%22%29%29%3B

struct person {
    field first_name    type string {}
    field last_name     type string {}
    field year_of_birth type int {}
}

field persons type array<person> {
    indexing: summary
    struct-field first_name    { indexing: attribute }
    struct-field last_name     { indexing: attribute }
    struct-field year_of_birth { indexing: attribute }
}
field identities type map<string, person> {
    indexing: summary
    struct-field key                 { indexing: attribute }
    struct-field value.first_name    { indexing: attribute }
    struct-field value.last_name     { indexing: attribute }
    struct-field value.year_of_birth { indexing: attribute }
}

where%20persons%20contains%20sameElement%28first_name%20contains%20'Joe',
%20last_name%20contains%20'Smith',%20year_of_birth%20%3C%201940%29%3B

where%20identities%20contains%20sameElement%28key%20contains%20'father',
%20value.first_name%20contains%20'Joe',%20value.last_name%20contains%20'Smith',%20value.year_of_birth%20%3C%201940%29%3B

where%20fieldName%20contains%20equiv%28%22A%22%2C%22B%22%29%3B

where%20myUrlField%20contains%20uri(%22vespa.ai%2Ffoo%22)%3B

where%20myUrlField.hostname%20contains%20uri(%5C%22vespa.ai%5C%22)%3B

where%20myUrlField.hostname%20contains%20(%5B%7B%22startAnchor%22%3A%20true%20%7D%5D%20uri(%22vespa.ai%22))%3B

Regular expressions is supported using posix extended syntax with the limitation that it is case insensitive. Replace contains with matches to run a regex search. This example becomes a substring search:

where%20title%20matches%20%22madonna%22%3B

where%20title%20matches%20%22mado%5Bn%5D%2Ba%22%3B

where%20title%20matches%20%22^mad%22%3B

Note: Only attribute fields in documents that have mode="index" is supported. It is also not optimized. Having a prefix using the ^ will be faster than not having one.

userInput() is a robust way of mixing user input and a formal query. It allows controlling whether the user input is to be stemmed, lowercased, etc, but it also allows for controlling whether it should be treated as a raw string, whether it should simply be segmented or parsed as a query.

yql=select%20%2A%20from%20sources%20%2A%20where%20userInput%28%40animal%29%3B&animal=panda

select%20%2A%20from%20sources%20%2A%20where%20default%20contains%20%22panda%22%3B

yql=select%20%2A%20from%20sources%20%2A%20where%20userInput%28%40animal%29%3B&animal=panda%20smokey

select%20%2A%20from%20sources%20%2A%20where%20default%20contains%20%22panda%22%20and%20default%20contains%20%22smokey%22%3B

yql=select%20%2A%20from%20sources%20%2A%20where%20range%28year%2C%201963%2C%202014%29
%20and%20%28userInput%28%40animal%29%20or%20userInput%28%40teddy%29%29%3B&animal=panda&teddy=bear%20roosevelt

select%20%2A%20from%20sources%20%2A%20where%20range%28year%2C%201963%2C%202014%29
%20and%20%28default%20contains%20%22panda%22%20or%20%28default%20contains%20%22bear%22%20and%20default%20contains%20%22roosevelt%22%29%29%3B

yql=select%20%2A%20from%20sources%20%2A%20where%20range%28year%2C%201963%2C%202014%29
%20and%20%28userInput%28%40animal%29%20or%20%5B%7B%22grammar%22%3A%20%22segment%22%7D%5DuserInput%28%40teddy%29%29%3B&animal=panda&teddy=bear%20roosevelt

select%20%2A%20from%20sources%20%2A%20where%20range%28year%2C%201963%2C%202014%29
%20and%20%28default%20contains%20%22panda%22%20or%20default%20contains%20phrase%28%22bear%22%2C%20%22roosevelt%22%29%29%3B

userInput() control annotations:

In addition, other annotations, like stem or ranked, will take effect as normal.

The query parsing mechanism has currently certain limitations for propagating annotation, therefore, for any value of grammar other than raw or segment, only the following annotations will take effect:

• ranked
• filter
• stem
• normalizeCase
• accentDrop
• usePositionData

userQuery() evaluates to the parsed user query, i.e. the HTTP API parameter named query (including the filter part, if this is available). The function userQuery represents where the heuristically parsed query is to be inserted as a sub-tree into the YQL query. In other words, this is not a string substitution, the user query is first parsed with any of the supported grammars, then the resulting tree is inserted into the corresponding place in the YQL query tree:

http://myhost.mydomain.com:8080/search/?query=abc%20def%20-ghi&type=all&
yql=select%20%2A%20from%20sources%20%2A%20where%20vendor%20contains%20%22brick%20and%20mortar%22%20AND%20price%20%3C%2050
%20AND%20userQuery%28%29%3B

The first, and only the first, argument of the rank() function determines whether a document is a match, but all arguments are used for calculating rank score.

where%20rank%28a%20contains%20%22A%22%2C%20b%20contains%20%22B%22%29%3B

dotProduct calculates the dot product between the weighted set in the query and a weighted set field in the document as its rank score contribution:

where%20dotProduct%28description%2C%20%7B%22a%22%3A1%2C%20%22b%22%3A2%7D%29%3B

A normal use case is a collection of weighted tokens produced by an algorithm, to match against a corpus containing weighted tokens produced by another algorithm in order to implement personalized content exploration.

Refer to multivalue query operators for a discussion of usage and examples.

When using weightedSet to search a field, all tokens present in the searched field will be matched against the weighted set in the query. This means that using a weighted set to search a single-value attribute field will have similar semantics to using a normal term to search a weighted set field. The low-level matching information resulting from matching a document with a weighted set in the query will contain the weights of all the matched tokens in descending order. Each matched weight will be represented as a standard occurrence on position 0 in element 0.

where%20weightedSet%28description%2C%20%7B%22a%22%3A1%2C%20%22b%22%3A2%7D%29%3B

Refer to multivalue query operators for a discussion of usage and examples.

wand can be used to search for documents where weighted tokens in a field matches a subset of weighted tokens in the query. At the same time, it internally calculates the dot product between token weights in the query and the field. wand is guaranteed to return the top-k hits according to its internal dot product rank score. It is an operator that scales adaptively from or to and.

wand optimizes the performance of using multiple threads per search in the backend, and is also called Parallel Wand.

wand also allows numeric arguments, then the search argument is an array of arrays of length two. In each pair, the first number is the search term, the second its weight:

where%20wand%28description%2C%20%5B%5B11%2C1%5D%2C%20%5B37%2C2%5D%5D%29%3B

where%20%5B%20%7B%22scoreThreshold%22%3A%200.13%2C%20%22targetNumHits%22%3A%207%7D%20%5Dwand%28description%2C%20%7B%22a%22%3A1%2C%20%22b%22%3A2%7D%29%3B

weakAnd is some times called Vespa Wand. Unlike wand, it accepts arbitrary word matches (across arbitrary fields) as arguments. Only a limited number of documents are returned for ranking (default is 100), but it does not guarantee to return the best k hits. This function can be seen as an optimized or:

where%20weakAnd%28a%20contains%20%22A%22%2C%20b%20contains%20%22B%22%29%3B

where%20%5B%7B%22scoreThreshold%22%3A%200.41%2C%20%22targetNumHits%22%3A%207%7D%5DweakAnd%28a%20contains%20%22A%22%2C%20b%20contains%20%22B%22%29%3B

Refer to using wand for a usage and examples.

nonEmpty takes as its only argument an arbitrary search expression. It will then perform a set of checks on that expression. If all the checks pass, the result is the same expression, otherwise the query will fail. The checks are as follows:

1. No empty search term
2. No empty operators, like phrases without terms
3. No null markers (NullItem) from e.g. failed query parsing

yql=select%20%2A%20from%20sources%20%2A%20where%20bar%20contains%20%22a%22%20and%20nonEmpty%28bar%20contains%20%22bar%22%20and%20foo%20contains%20%40foo%29&foo=

predicate() specifies a predicate query - see predicate fields. It takes three arguments: the predicate field to search, a map of attributes, and a map of range attributes:

where%20predicate(predicate_field%2C%7B%22gender%22%3A%22Female%22%7D%2C%7B%22age%22%3A20L%7D)%3B

where%20predicate(predicate_field%2C0%2C%7B%22age%22%3A20L%7D)%3B

where%20title%20contains%20(%5B%7B"weight"%3A200%7D%5D"heads")%20and%20album%20contains%20"tails"%3B