actions

The unique identifier of this action (useful for debugging). Required if schedule is set.

The index name targeted by this action. This value is appended to the indexPrefix, when specified.

How often to perform a complete crawl for this action. See main property schedule for more information.

Determines which webpages match for this action. This list is checked against the url of webpages using micromatch. You can use negation, wildcards and more.

Checks for the presence or absence of DOM nodes.

Set this value if you want to index documents. Chosen file types will be converted to HTML using Tika, then treated as a normal HTML page. See the documents guide for a list of available fileTypes.

Generate an objectID for records that don’t have one. Setting this parameter to false means we’ll raise an error if an extracted record doesn’t have an objectID.

A recordExtractor is a custom Javascript function that lets you execute your own code and extract what you want from a page. Your record extractor should return either an array of JSON or an empty array. If the function returns an empty array, the page is skipped.

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recordExtractor: ({ url, $, contentLength, fileType})  => {
  return [
    {
      url: url.href,
      text: $('p').html()
      ... /* anything you want */
    }
  ];
  // return []; skips the page
}

A Cheerio instance containing the HTML of the crawled page.

A Location object containing the URL and metadata for the crawled page.

The fileType of the crawled page (e.g.: html, pdf, …).

The number of bytes in the crawled page.

Array of external data sources.

Collection of functions to help you extract content and generate records.

The helpers.splitContentIntoRecords() function is callable from your recordExtractor. It extracts textual content from the resource (i.e. HTML page or document) and splits it into in one or more records. It can be used to index the textual content exhaustively and in a way to prevent record_too_big errors.

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recordExtractor: ({ url, $, helpers }) => {
  const baseRecord = {
    url,
    title: $('head title').text().trim(),
  };
  const records = helpers.splitContentIntoRecords({
    baseRecord,
    $elements: $('body'),
    maxRecordBytes: 1000,
    textAttributeName = 'text',
    orderingAttributeName = 'part',
  });
  // You can still alter produced records
  // afterwards, if needed.
  return records;
}

In the example recordExtractor() function above, crawling a long HTMTL page will return an array of records that will never exceed the limit of 1000 bytes per record. The records, extracted by the splitContentIntoRecords method, would look similar to this:

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[
  {
    url: 'http://test.com/index.html',
    title: 'Home - Test.com',
    part: 0
    text: 'Welcome on test.com, the best resource to',
  },
  {
    url: 'http://test.com/index.html',
    title: 'Home - Test.com',
    part: 1
    text: 'find interesting content online.',
  }
]

Assuming that the automatic generation of objectIDs is enabled in your configuration, the crawler generates an objectID for each of the generated records.

In order to prevent duplicate results when searching for a word that appears in multiple records belonging to the same resource (page), we recommend that you enable distinct in your index settings, set the attributeForDistinct, searchableAttributes, and add a custom ranking from first record on your page to the last:

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initialIndexSettings: {
  'my-index': {
    distinct: true,
    attributeForDistinct: 'url'
    searchableAttributes: [ 'title', 'text' ],
    customRanking: [ 'asc(part)' ],
  }
}

Please be aware that using distinct comes with some specificities.

A Cheerio instance that determines from which element(s) textual content will be extracted and turned into records.

Attributes (and their values) to add to all resulting records.

Maximum number of bytes allowed per record, on the resulting Algolia index. You can refer to the record size limits for your plan to prevent any errors regarding record size.

Name of the attribute in which to store the text of each record.

Name of the attribute in which to store the number of each record.