text, text_oneline

text and text_oneline store characters in one language. In the server, these types are treated the same, text_oneline is only a hint for frontends on how to display the data. So it is possible (over the API) to use newlines in a text_online column.

Text are stored as received, so a leading or trailing space is preserved. Frontends are requested to trim texts before sending them to the API.

Text must be encoded in UTF-8 and stores in all normalization forms. There is not limit on the length of storable text.

API

Text looks like this when send and received over the API:

{
    "text": "this is the text"
}

The above example has the value this is the text for column text.

Index

Normalization is performed as part of the indexer documentation creation where all text is run through a icu_normalizer.

In the indexer, text is stored using a custom analyzer icu_text which works as follows:

{
  "analysis": {
   "icu_text": {
     "type": "custom",
     "tokenizer": "custom_icu_tokenizer",
     "filter": [
       "icu_folding"
     ],
     "char_filter": [
       "icu_normalizer"
     ]
  },
  "tokenizer": {
    "custom_icu_tokenizer": {
      "type": "pattern",
      "pattern": "([[^\\p{L}\\p{Digit}\\uD800-\\uDFFF\\u2F00-\\u2FDF]&&[^&%§\\$€]])"
    }
  }
}

Text is normalized using the icu_normalizer and tokenized into tokens using the above pattern.

What gets included in tokens:

• All alphabetic letters from any language.

• All numeric digits.

• Characters in the Unicode surrogate pair range and Kangxi Radicals.

• Symbols: &, %, §, $, and €.

What causes token separation:

• Punctuation marks (except the specified symbols).

• Whitespace characters.

• Other symbols and control characters not specified.

Tokens are then turned into terms using the icu_folding token filter. The filter removes all punctuation and turns all characters into lower case. So the token Bär is stored as bar.

Using the API, searches for text can be performed either on the analysed value (matching the terms), or on the unanalysed value, which is stored alongside with all terms. The unanalysed value stores the data as is. There is no normalisation taking place.

All text for indexed documents is split into chunks of 8000 UTF-8 characters. When matching full texts in analysed form, text cannot easily be matched if they exceed 8000 characters.

Sorting

Sort strings are compiled using the Go library collate. It uses the first configured database language as assumption in what language the text is in. Numbers are recognised so that Car 100 sorts after Car 11. Text is normalised by the collate library. Internally we use the hex representation of that string to work around anomalies in Elasticsearch. Some special replacement is always done.

Export

Text is exported as is, keeping spaces & normalisation.

The XML export looks like this for a column names title and a value Title for type text_oneline. The column-api-id in this example 29.

<title type="text_oneline" column-api-id="29">Title</title>

For type text type is text.

Output in CSV is as is, same for JSON.