Guides / Managing results / Refine results / Filtering

Algolia allows you to filter results by boolean attributes. Imagine you have an e-commerce website, and you want users to search through available products. If you have a boolean attribute called is_available, you can exclude all records where is_available is false. To do this, you must first declare is_available as an attribute for faceting.

Dataset Example

Let’s say we have an index called products that looks like this:

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[
  {
    "name": "Apple iPhone 5s",
    "is_available": true
  },
  {
    "name": "Apple iPhone 7",
    "is_available": true
  },
  {
    "name": "Apple iPhone X",
    "is_available": false
  },
  ...
]

Applying a boolean filter

If you want users to see only the available products, do the following.

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$results = $index->search('query', [
  'filters' => 'is_available:true'
]);

The engine considers booleans as integers: false as 0 and true as 1. That means you can apply numeric filters for boolean attributes. With the preceding example dataset, you can apply the filter is_available=0 for the same effect as is_available:false, and is_available=1 for is_available:true. If using numeric filters, you don’t need to declare the attribute in attributesForFaceting.

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