Will AzureSearch be deprecated with AzureAISearchRetriever in place?

[Hadi2525]

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Example Code

python
from langchain_community.retrievers import AzureAISearchRetriever

retriever = AzureAISearchRetriever(
    content_key="content", 
    top_k=top_references, 
    index_name=index_name,
    service_name=service_name,
    api_key=search_query_key
)

question = "find me the document about bla bla bla"

docs = retriever.get_relevant_documents(question)

### Vs. the following approach with AzureSearch ###
from langchain_openai import AzureOpenAIEmbeddings
from langchain_community.vectorstores.azuresearch import AzureSearch

embeddings = AzureOpenAIEmbeddings(
    model = azure_embeddings_deployment,
    api_key=aoai_key,
    api_version=aoai_api_version
)

vector_store: AzureSearch = AzureSearch(
    embedding_function=embeddings.embed_query,
    azure_search_endpoint=azure_endpoint,
    azure_search_key=azure_search_key,
    index_name=index_name,
    semantic_configuration_name=azure_semantic_configuration_name,
    search_type=search_type,    
)

docs = vector_store.semantic_hybrid_search_with_score_and_rerank(question)

Description

If you look at the above code, both methods work as retrievers except that AzureSearch inherits VectorStore and AzureAISearchRetriever inherits BaseRetriever. They return the closest top_k documents along with search score. Note that with AzureSearch I encounter custom field naming issues and I also notice some other issues like not properly passing the input arguments like search_type to the client.Search method. You can follow this PR for details #9894.

I am focusing on pushing an update/PR for some of the issues with AzureSearch class and would like to know if this library is whether posed to deprecation or not.

Here are the issues I am trying to address in AzureSearch:

• Replace the object desruction functionality __del__ with another mechanism to properly address the cleanup
• Add a List of field_names as input to the class and address issues with env variable namings

Let me know if you have any comments or suggestions @hwchase17 @baskaryan @reflection @ruoccofabrizio @levalencia

Thanks!

System Info

langchain==0.3.0
langchain-community==0.3.0
langchain-core==0.3.5
langchain-openai==0.2.0
langchain-text-splitters==0.3.0
platform mac
python version 3.11.1