FTS searching on empty field

[flaviu]

I have a document with a structure like this:

{
  "id": "2fa80bae-2eed-4291-bb78-09cdb7d80003",
  "pp": "text",
  "ii": ""
}

the field ii is indexed in the FTS as keyword

when I try from the PHP SDK to search all the documents with ii being “” I get no results:

$conjunctionQuery[] = (new MatchSearchQuery("")) ->field("ii");

I am doing a ConjunctionSearchQuery, so this is just a part of the query

I tried with MatchPhraseSearchQuery and MatchSearchQuery but none seems to work correctly. the ii can be either empty, or it can conain an UUID of the format: “2fa80bae-2eed-4291-bb78-09cdb7d80003”

What can I do to be able to find the documents with either an empty field “” or an UUID?

[abhinav]

FTS does not differentiate between missing fields or null values during search. So searching for empty field content is unfortunately something we don’t support.

N1QL however can - you can look into creating a secondary index and running SQL-like queries via the query workbench to help you here with IS_NULL or IS_MISSING.

[flaviu]

so, there is no way in which I could exclude the results with empty field? (not returning results with something in the field)

not sure if is clear. If I have a a search results with 5000 rows, from these 5000, 150 have this field empty. isn’t any option to return just the 4850 results?

[abhinav]

Sorry if I wasn’t clear, FTS automatically excludes documents where the “field”'s value is empty or where the “field” is missing.

Here’s a sample query that does this …

{"query": {"match_all": {}}, "fields": ["special_field"]}

This query will emit out the “special_field” content (where available) alongside the document IDs in the hits section of the search response.