Flex Query Language helps end users to perform customised searches within both user interaces (e.g. FlexMAM) and other Dalet Flex microservices which requires search service. FQL enables you to carry out complex structured searches in Dalet Flex.

Syntax

In Dalet Flex, you can carry out simple lexical text based searches by simply entering a word or phrase. You can also use the Query Language to help you carry out more complex searches. The syntax that can be used is as follows:

Semantic Search

Dalet Flex supports performing a semantic search on assets. To enhance content retrieval, semantic search uses queries that are similar in meaning to the actual content of the Asset Name, Description and other string metadata fields (as configured), images and keyframes rather than just matching keywords.  Semantic search understands synonym recognition, phrase interpretation, entity recognition etc, allowing you to search using a more general query to find useful results. 

Semantic search uses the FQL operator ai-search

ai-search(Pope Francis) performs a semantic search for Pope Francis

This operator can be used with all existing FQL operators.

ai-search(Pope Francis) AND fileAssetType=Image performs a semantic search for the phrase Pope Francis together with a filter to return only images.

(ai-search(Pope Francis) AND (Pope)) AND fileAssetType=Image returns results that semantic match the phrase "Pope Francis"  and contain the term "Pope" in any attribute or searchable metadata field, along with a filter to fetch only the images.

AND and OR

All queries can be combined with boolean logic using AND and OR, using brackets where necessary to indicate precedence. In the absence of brackets, boolean operations are left-to-right associative, without preferring either AND or OR, i.e.:

• A OR B AND C is the same as (A OR B) AND C
• A AND B OR C is the same as (A AND B) OR C

Multi-OR for a single field:

If you want to match a given field for a range of possibilities (like an IN operation in SQL) then an operation like field=value1 OR field=value2 OR field=value3 will not generate the most efficient Elasticsearch query under the hood.
Instead, we recommend this syntax: field=(value1 OR value2 OR value3).

Freetext search

Equality searches (text, numeric, or date fields)

Dates

When searching date fields, the date should be written in the format yyyy-MM-dd HH:mm:ss or yyyy-MM-dd surrounded by double quotes. E.g. lastModified="2017-06-22 10:24:05".

Contains searches (text fields only)

Note that there is no logical difference between quoting the value part of a Contains search, except that quoting it may help if your query contains other FQL operators, e.g. "sort by", "or", "and", "=", "(", ")", "!", "^", ">", "<", "~".

Boosting

You can boost results by using the carat character ^, which boosts any matching objects in the results. For example, in the example below you would get all objects whose name contains "film from partner" or is an image asset, but the image asset objects will appear higher in the search results.

name~"film from partner" OR objectType.name^2=image-asset.

Empty matching

You can search on example values using NULL.

title=NULL

Metadata field matching

Searching on the name of a metadata field will match objects referencing any metadata definition with a field of that name. e.g. If 2 metadata definitions exist, both with a field called "string-field", the FQL string-field=somevalue would match objects using either of those definitions.

In order to target a specific metadata definition in this case, you need to know the ID of the metadata definition, and then perform a search using FQL like "metadata-<definitionid>.string-field"=somevalue.

Examples

Wildcarding

Related doc on bitbucket with enhanced info

https://bitbucket.org/ooyalaflex/flex-query-language-library/src/master/README.md:

FQL (Flex Query Language) Library

Flex Query Language is a (SQL Like) Query DSL to help end users to perform customised search. This is used by both UI (MAM) and other microservices which requires search service. Below are the sample queries that you can perform on flex resources.

Examples

FQL is best demonstrated with examples. Note that all queries can be combined with boolean logic using AND and OR, with brackets where necessary to show precedence. In the absence of brackets, boolean operations are left-to-right associative, without preferring either AND or OR, i.e.:

• A OR B AND C === (A OR B) AND C
• A AND B OR C === (A AND B) OR C

Multi-OR for a given field:

If you want to match a given field for a range of possibilities (like an "IN" operation in SQL) then an operation like

• field=value1 OR field=value2 OR field=value3

is not the most efficient. Instead we recommend you to use this syntax:

• field=(value1 OR value2 OR value3)

Freetext search examples

Note that if the flex/flex-searchelastic-service/featureToggles/wrapFreeTextQueriesWithWildcards Consul KV is not set to false, then all freetext searches will become an ORed combination of: - the old freetext searching behaviour - the old freetext searching behaviour, but with a * character automatically prepended and appended to turn it into a wildcard query.

Customers wishing to explicitly revert to the old behavior may do so be explicitly setting the feature toggle to false.

Targeted field search examples

Unless you deliberately want to match any possible field with a given name, we strongly recommend quoting the field you are targeting, e.g. "name" ~ blah instead of name ~ blah. The first query would only match the top-level object name; the latter query could also return results if there are any object sub-fields or metadata fields called name matching the criteria.

Miscellaneous searches (text, numeric, or date fields)

Note that if the flex/flex-searchelastic-service/featureToggles/nullMatchesEmptyStrings Consul KV is set to true, then =NULL FQL clauses will match not only missing fields, but also empty strings (in the case of textual fields).

Equality searches (text, numeric, or date fields)

Relative searches (numeric or date fields only)

I've included various sorting examples here, for good measure.

Contains searches (text fields only)

Note that there is no logical difference between quoting the value part of a Contains search, except that quoting it may help if your query contains other FQL operators, e.g. "sort by", "or", "and", "=", "(", ")", "!", "^", ">", "<", "~".

Complex queries within the same nested path

Not yet implemented

The following pieces of functionality are not yet implemented, but they are under consideration for future development.

Other examples

For more examples, please refer the following test files.

• FieldMappingTest.java
• MappingServiceTest.java
• FieldMappingsComparatorTest.java