Best way to implement fulltext search on a collection?

[Raigato]

Hello 👋

I would like to create a fulltext search endpoint for one of my collections.

My idea for now it to follow this doc to create a standard text search with weights.
However, I have no idea where would be the best place to add the createdIndex line.

Also, I am wondering if I could just expose the payload admin search engine with some filters. Or if any other "idiomatic" way of doing this exist.

Thank you in advance for your guidance 🙏

[pooledge]

I am not sure whether this is the best way, but, after creating an index I've simply added an endpoint within server.ts to perform a text search, and it seems working:

app.get('/search', async (req, res) => {
	const query = `${req.query.q}` || '';

	const results = await payload.db.collections['items'].find({
		$text: { $search: query },
	});

	res.json({ results });
});

https://payloadcms.com/docs/database/mongodb#access-to-mongoose-models

[Raigato]

Thank you @pooledge, did you created the $text index manually or added it somewhere in your codebase?
Doing it manually might be an issue for me as I work with PR staging environments creating a new db every time

[pooledge]

Just came back to it. So far it works for me with a named index created on server (re)start:

const start = async () => {
	// ...somewhere after payload itself has been initialized

	payload.db.collections['items'].schema.index(
		{ title: 'text', description: 'text' },
		{
			name: 'fulltext_1',
			...
		}
	)
}

[deep-1241]

payload.db.collections['items'].schema.index(
{ title: 'text', description: 'text' },
)

Below error is coming when trying to implement this:
Property 'collections' does not exist on type 'DatabaseAdapter'