IN operator

[curquiza]

Related issue: meilisearch/meilisearch#2163

The users seem to need the IN operator when searching with filter.

If you are a Meilisearch user, feel free to give more detail about use case and your need :)

[francoism90]

This is really useful when you need to filter on user feeds. For example, a user that search on his/her bookmarks.

[eelco-weblog]

This feature can also be useful for a related feature:
#77

For example an e-commerce site wants to display Apple Airpods, but not Apple Airpods Max. Now, we can create an array of all the words in the title, save it as another property such as title_words and filter something like this:

(title_words = airpod and title_words != max)

When we can use CONTAINS / NOT CONTAINS, we do not have to create another property and filter directly on the title:

(title CONTAINS airpod and title NOT CONTAINS max)

When this is implemented, it might also be a solution for the use-cases for this discussion: #77

[curquiza]

Hello @francoism90 and @eelco-weblog,
Thanks for your feedback! FYI, we are considering adding this feature :)

[francoism90]

@curquiza Great! 👍

[JerryBels]

I got here by searching for a solution for a NOT IN use case. I'm making a multiple users selection tool, and would like the search to filter out already selected users from the list. A NOT IN filter would be ideal for that. For the time being I will use a loop with != filters.

[gmourier]

A technical oriented discussion now exists here

[gmourier]

Hello dear community, 👋

We have published a docker image allowing you to test the addition of the IN operator.

IN operator

Instead of writing a cumbersome clause like user_id = 1 OR user_id = 2 OR user_id = 3 .... It's possible to write user_id IN [1, 2, 3] and voila!

• user_id IN [...] selects all documents whose attribute contains at least one of the values given inside the brackets. In case there are no values, then the filter selects no documents.
• NOT user_id IN[...] selects all documents whose attribute contains values that are all different from those in the brackets. (It includes documents missing the attribute - See EXISTS operator for more granularity).

---

We have also made some other changes that may be of interest to you.

NOT / != behavior

NOT /!= operator has been enhanced following this discussion.

tags != adult now returns documents having tags: null or tags: [] but also documents without the tags property. It's equivalent to NOT tags = adult.

The NOT operator selects all documents not selected by the filter that follows it.

EXISTS operator

We took the opportunity to add the operator EXISTS. This operator allows you to granularly require that the selected documents have a tag attribute regardless of its value.

In this case, tags != adult and tags EXISTS to retrieve documents that do not contain the adult value in the tag attribute and only those for which the tag attribute exists.

• tags EXISTS selects all documents having the tags attribute.
• NOT tags EXISTS selects all documents missing the tags attribute.

---

We would like to have your feedback before deciding whether to introduce the given changes in a future version.

To do so you have to pull the docker image we prepared.

docker run -it --rm \
    -p 7700:7700 \
    -v $(pwd)/meili_data:/meili_data \
    getmeili/meilisearch:v0.29.0-filter.beta.0

Thank you so much for being part of our community ✨

[francoism90]

@gmourier I'm using Laravel Scout - any (beta) packages I should try?

Thanks for this! It will speed up querying a lot I think. :)

[brunoocasali]

Hi @francoism90 meilisearch-php is not compatible with Meilisearch v0.28 yet! But it will be in the next week - on Monday :)
As soon as the Meilisearch engine releases its new version we will release the new version of our SDKs, so after that, you can try these new awesome filters in your laravel app 💪

[gmourier]

I know it's not ideal @francoism90 but you can test it with curl or postman if you really want to do it before next week. 🏃‍♂️

[gmourier]

Hello 👋
We have just released v0.29.0rc1, which is a release candidate of v0.29.0 🔥

You can test the just-introduced EXISTS and IN filtering operators!
More information in this issue and this one.

Binaries are attached to the release, or you can use the docker image:

docker run -it --rm \
    -p 7700:7700 \
    getmeili/meilisearch:v0.29.0rc1

Let us know about any bugs or feedback! 😄 It would be really helpful.

FYI, the official v0.29.0 release will be available on 3rd October.

[gmourier]

Hey everyone 👋

Locking this discussion since the IN operator has been released.

IN [valueA, valueB, …, valueN] selects all documents whose chosen field contains at least one of the specified values. The expression genres IN [horror, comedy] returns all documents whose genres includes either horror, comedy, or both

📚 https://docs.meilisearch.com/learn/advanced/filtering_and_faceted_search.html#using-filters

Please open a new discussion if you have any feedback to share 🙇‍♂️