Date/Time Parsers

Custom date/time parsers can be specified to allow matches to be made across date/time formats.

The Search Service expects dates to be in the format specified by RFC-3339 , which is a specific profile of ISO-8601. Since Search queries need to specify dates in RFC-3339 format, the dates that are stored in Full Text Indexes also need to be in RFC-3339 format.

A date/time parser tells the Search Service ahead of time what the date/time layout of a field will be. If the Type of a child field is set to datetime, and the time layout(s) found in that field is not in RFC-3339 format, then you can specify a custom date/time parser that contains the layouts that the Search Service is to expect.

Add Date/Time Parsers

Date/Time Parsers can be specified to allow matches to be made across different formats:

To add the date/time parser

Left click the + Add Date/Time Parser

The Customer Date/Time Parser dialog appears.

Enter a suitable name for the custom parser into the Name field.

Left-click on the + Add button to successively add the layouts for the parser in the interactive field below the Layouts field, by after each one:

This adds the layout to a list of layouts displayed in the Layouts field.

To remove any of these, select its name in the Layouts field, and left-click on the Remove button. When the list is complete, left-click on the Save button to save.

As an example, consider the index created on a travel-sample bucket. The format of date followed in the reviews.date field of a document in the hotel collection is- 2006-01-02 15:04:05 +0300 rather than the RFC 339 format, so build a custom date/time parser:

Furthermore, the type mapping section must have an mapping for the reviews.date field which looks something like this:

To see check the effect the above parser has, run the following query:

curl -XPOST -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
-u <username>:<password> http://localhost:8094/api/index/travel/query -d '{
  "query": {
    "start": "2001-10-09 10:20:30",
    "end": "2016-10-31 18:15:30",
    "inclusive_start": false,
    "inclusive_end": false,
    "field": "reviews.date"
   }
}'

Response:

{
  "status": {
    "total": 1,
    "failed": 0,
    "successful": 1
  },
  "request": {
    "query": {
      "start": "2001-10-09T10:20:30Z",
      "end": "2016-10-31T18:15:30Z",
      "inclusive_start": false,
      "inclusive_end": false,
      "field": "reviews.date"
    },
    "size": 10,
    "from": 0,
    "highlight": null,
    "fields": null,
    "facets": null,
    "explain": false,
    "sort": [
      "-_score"
    ],
    "includeLocations": false,
    "search_after": null,
    "search_before": null
  },
  "hits": [
    ...
    {
      "index": "travel_5af762cb0820e7a2_4c1c5584",
      "id": "hotel_10848",
      "score": 0.9690093829140931,
      "sort": [
        "_score"
      ]
    },
    {
      "index": "travel_5af762cb0820e7a2_4c1c5584",
      "id": "hotel_25166",
      "score": 0.9624070465826247,
      "sort": [
        "_score"
      ]
    },
    ...
  ],
  "total_hits": 833,
  "max_score": 1.046790992842069,
  "took": 649213,
  "facets": null
}

Documentation on using the Go Programming Language to specify layouts is provided on the page Package time. In particular, see the section func Parse.