Fuzzy search FTW with Xata
This week we explored search for "Prune your follows" on the unauthorized and rum-fueled treasure hunt in the sharky waters around the Gatsby islands 🏴☠️
Xata has search built-in. Even fuzzy search! Something that makes a dyslectic like me very happy.
Fuzzy search allows spelling errors by setting a fuzziness level.
On stream, we didn't manage to highlight the matches. We did think it was probably possible. And we were right! A Xata engineer reached out after the stream and told us how 🥳
The Code
// Function user in server-side code,
// in our case by a Gatsby Serverless Function
export const searchFollowing = async ({ followerId, sort, search }) => {
const results = await xata.search.all(search, {
tables: [
{
table: "accounts",
target: [
{ column: "name", weight: 7 },
{ column: "username", weight: 7 },
{ column: "meta.location" },
{ column: "meta.description" },
],
filter: { followed_by: followerId },
},
],
highlight: { enabled: true },
fuzziness: 1,
prefix: "phrase",
});
return results.map((result) => {
return {
...result,
searchInfo: result.record.getMetadata(),
};
});
};Results returned from the above function 👇
// Removed surplus properties for brevity
[
{
"table": "accounts",
"record": {
"name": "Xata 🦋 Think Data, not Databases",
"username": "xata",
"followed_by": "4092141"
},
"searchInfo": {
"highlight": {
"followed_by": ["<em>4092141</em>"],
"name": ["<em>Xata</em> 🦋 Think <em>Data</em>, not Databases"],
"username": ["<em>xata</em>"]
},
"score": 40.357788,
"table": "accounts",
"version": 15
}
},
{
// And more results
}
]And we can use the highlight property to create highlighted results.
For the complete code, check out the Prune your Follows repository on Github.
All the best,
Queen Raae
PS: Xata is sponsoring our rework of Prune your Follows