exclude certain records from laravel scout/algolia

Question

I am using laravel scout to upload records for searching in algolia. I have added the searchable trait to my model, and everything is working fine.

There is a case now where I don't want to add certain records to my index if they have set status I.E UNPUBLISHED.

is there away I can evaluate the status field and decide if I want the model to be uploaded to the index?

Answer 1

Just use $model_name->unsearchable() to remove it from your Algolia index.

See "Removing Records" in the documentation for more details: https://laravel.com/docs/5.3/scout#removing-records

Answer 2

You can use method toSearchableData() and in case the status is Unpublished, just return empty array and the record will be skipped. Otherwise just return $this->toArray().

It will do the trick.

Answer 3

Say we have a Post model, with a boolean published attribute, and a model factory to seed our table as follows:

$factory->define(App\Post::class, function (Faker\Generator $faker) {
    $tile = $faker->realText(50);
    $date = $faker->dateTime;

    return [
        'title'     => $tile,
        'body'      => $faker->realText(500),
        'published' => $faker->boolean(80),
        'created_at' => $date,
        'updated_at' => $date
    ];
});

Let's say we will seed 10 records.

public function run()
{
    factory(App\Article::class, 10)->create();
}

If we tried to exclude unpublished records within the toSearchableArray() method, as suggested:

public function toSearchableArray()
{
    if (! $this->published) {
        return[];
    }

    // ...
}

When seeding the posts table, instead of ignoring unpublished records by returning an empty array, scout will keep asking the model factory for a published model.

For example, if two of the seeded records were randomly unpublished, scout would index all 10 records (instead of 8) anyway, replacing the unpublished ones by a new model factory (with a published set attribute). Thus causing to have two inexistent (on our table) records in the algolia index. Quite confusing.

The "neatest" way around this I could come up with, was to listen to the saved/updated events (saving/updating won't cut it) in the model's boot method.

protected static function boot()
{
    static::saved(function ($model) {
        if (! $model->published) {
            $model->unsearchable();
        }
    });

    static::updated(function ($model) {
        if (! $model->published) {
            $model->unsearchable();
        }
    });

    parent::boot();
}

Answer 4

Check out this question. This problem has been solved in the new version of Scout Adding Index to Laravel Scout Conditionally (Algolia)