Are you working with SEAL? Let me know!

[alexander-schranz]

It is nice to see that some people are developing projects they work on daily basis which are using seal as seen in the packagist statistics:

https://packagist.org/packages/schranz-search/seal/stats

I'm highly interesting which developers and companies using SEAL to get there feedback about it. So let me know who you are and what kind of software you created with SEAL if possible. What adapter and in which framework you use SEAL.

[ToshY]

Hey @alexander-schranz 👋

I've been using SEAL with the schranz-search/symfony-bundle and schranz-search/seal-meilisearch-adapter for roughly a year now (see #315) for a hobby project, and up until now I have been only using some functionality of it, in particularly schemas and reindexing (partially). As you might be worndering why I'm only partially using SEAL, I will try to explain certain aspects and the ups-and-downs I personally encountered when using it.

Schemas

I find the schemas are very straighforward to use and it's easy to add new fields. The ability to have searchable, filterable and sortable makes it really flexible and not complicated at all. I have no further remarks about this, it just works nicely 👍

Reindex operations

While I initially used the provided schranz:search:reindex a couple of times, I realised it will reindex indexes sequentially. This is doable if your indexes are small, but having to rebuild multiple larger indexes this can take some time, and rebuilding one index requires waiting for the other one to finish. As this is a bit of a "blocking" action (in the context of contious deployment), I instead created a custom command to dispatch messages (note: Symfony Messenger) for each index, and in the handler it calls the schranz ReindexCommand using a Symfony Process.

// This logic is in the message handler
$index = 'test';
$process = new Process(
    [
        'bin/console',
        ReindexCommand::getDefaultName(),
        ...['--index', $index, '--drop'],
    ],
    cwd: '/app',
    timeout: null,
);

This way, when intially calling the custom command, it is 1) non-blocking (as messages will be handled async through the bus) and 2) having multiple workers you can handle multiple different indexes at the same time (and thus reindex faster).

_{FYI, I also just saw #430, and initially thought this would solve the above, but it seems "bulk" refers to inserts on single index.}

Conditions

I wanted to use the filter and conditions SEAL had to offer, but I quickly find myself that operations like OR/AND (#317), distuingish between null or empty values (#318), or operators like IN / NOT IN (Meilisearch) were not available at the time. And while #317 has been merged recently, I can still not fully use the MeilisearchSearcher and have to rely on Meilisearch Client directly (which mostly has to do with the next point).

"Filters"

The main problem I am still facing with Meilisearch, as well as SEAL, is that both lack the ability to add and remove "filters" dynamically. To further explain what I mean with (for other readers as well), I've described this before here meilisearch/meilisearch-symfony#315 and #315.

This ability to add and remove these in a flexibile manner is something that is essential for my use cases, and I had to resort to create custom logic for this to achieve what I needed (see meilisearch/meilisearch-symfony#315 (comment)). Over time, I've refined this approach and have a working system with a customised Meilisearch Client that allows for this flexibility.

While I've come to peace with the idea that something like this (filters) is not something that will be implementend in either libraries any time soon (or at all), it is the main reason I'm not able to use SEAL to its full extend.

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Hope you didn't get the wrong idea about the above, because I'm still happily using SEAL as part of my project and I will keep on using it, even if it's just for the easy-to-use schemas and reindexing. 🙂

Keep up the great work 🥇

[alexander-schranz]

Really thank you for your feedback.

Hope you didn't get the wrong idea about the above, because I'm still happily using SEAL as part of my project and I will keep on using it, even if it's just for the easy-to-use schemas and reindexing. 🙂

I really want to start with this one as that is mostly also something I really try to communicate in my presentation and talks about SEAL. There are situations like yours where you will end up where SEAL does not provide all functionality which you are searching for. But the solution you are doing is the one I recommend, use the tools of SEAL (Schema, Reindexing, ...) what you can do, but if you end in search queries for special cases where SEAL does not fulfill your requirements just use the client of your search engine directly. If you need migrate to a other Engine it is still easier as when not using SEAL, as still SEAL will provide you the other functionality, really happy to see that you did go that way and kept SEAL in your codebase.

Filters: The main problem I am still facing with Meilisearch, as well as SEAL, is that both lack the ability to add and remove "filters"

Why I may think that filters or may "Global Filters" will not be part of the core I think I have some idea in mind to make things easier here and add some situation to the docs.

Conditions: distuingish between null or empty values (#318)

Can you add some more detail information about this to #318. That would be great.

Conditions: InCondition

Please create an issue for this one.

Conditions: NotInCondition

Please create an own issue for this one.

Reindex operations

You did interpret #430 correctly. It is bulk insert for a single index. But still it will improve the reindexing a lot see comment in #24. Would be interesting how faster that is in your case. PS: you can define a bulk size with --bulk-size=100. Another feature which might be interesting for you is #212 but I need rethink about that implementation.

Schemas

Thx for the feedback, good to hear it works for you.

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@ToshY Really thank you, this kind of feedbacks really helps to see where the limits are and where things can be improved in two cases of features but also documentation of extending. Thank you for your time for this detailed feedback.