Search for not empty fields

General Discussion
1

Hey FB has some quirks, one of which seems to be that you cant search for non empty fields.

Let’s say I have events, some have a location set, some do not (for what ever reason). Or some have speakers, some do not.. What I want to do find all events where location (in this case) is not null / empty. How would one do this?

I have these fields mapped to metadata i.e. meta_audience and meta_location..

Cheers

2

Hi Clarke,

Funnelback supports quite a few query operators which allows you to do things like scope and negate certain queries:

Below are a few examples which might prove useful:

Querying for documents with an empty value for particular metadata:

<query> |-<metadata class>:$++
e.g. Query for all documents which does not have a value for metadata class author
!padrneull |-author:$++

Querying for documents that does not have a certain metadata value:

<query> |-<metadata class>:$++<value to exclude>$++
e.g. Query for all documents which do not have the value "Data Model" in the kbFeatures metadata class
!padrenull |-kbFeatures:$++Data Model$++

Hope this help.

~Gioan

3

Kind of…

What’s the query for all documents that has metadata class ‘location’ set to anything (i.e. not null)?

4

Gone burger with fries

5

It’s the first example but without the -

Querying for documents with an empty value for particular metadata:

<query> |<metadata class>:$++
e.g. Query for all documents which has a value for metadata class author
!padrneull |author:$++
6

Yep tried that, doesn’t work cleanly.

IDeas?

7

Ok that’s odd - it looks like there might be bug.

Could you please send this in as a support request via support@funnelback.com and request that they raise this as a bug on your behalf?

8

The crux of this issue is the collection is XML Push, so if that field was empty in the XML it wont have mapped in an empty sting against that metadata in FB, the metadata class doesn’t even exist for that record.