Indexing Documents

This guide will help you quickly get familiar with the basics of using the Indexing API by configuring a datasource, indexing a document, and enabling the datasource to show up in search.

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Index a document for the datasource

Once the datasource is configured, we can index documents. A document has the following key fields.

id This is a unique identifier for the document within the datasource. The id can only contain alphanumeric characters (underscores are not allowed). The id should be stable, meaning that the same document must keep the same id across uploads. If an id is not provided, we use a hash of the viewURL as the id.

objectType Type of object within the datasource. For example, a drive might have objects of type file and folder.

title Title of the document.

body Searchable document body. This might be shown in search result snippets.

viewURL A unique URL that can used to view the document in a browser. This viewURL must also match the urlRegex specified while creating the datasource.

permissions This can be used to control visibility of the document in search results for different Glean users. For simplicity, in this tutorial, we will only index a document with anonymous access using permissions.allowAnonymousAccess.

curl -X POST   https://customer-be.glean.com/api/index/v1/indexdocument \
  -H 'Authorization: Basic <Token>' \
  -d '{
        "document": {
            "datasource": "gleantest",
            "objectType": "EngineeringDoc",
            "id": "blueskytest-1",
            "title": "Getting started with Blue Sky",
            "body": {
              "mimeType": "text/plain",
              "textContent": "This doc will help you get familiar with Blue Sky API"
            },
              "permissions": {
              "allowAnonymousAccess": true
            },
            "viewURL": "https://bluesky.test/blueskytest-1"
        }
    }'

To learn about more document customization options here

To learn more about how to set up user identities, and more complex permissions, read Setting permissions

To index documents in bulk, you can use Bulk indexing

For helpful troubleshooting tips, read Troubleshooting

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Enable search results for the datasource

To be able to search for the indexed document in Glean, it must be enabled show up in search results.

Glean admins can go to the ‘Overview’ tab on the setup page for their custom app to enable the datasource to show up in search results.

Results can be configured to be visible to all teammates or to their configured test group

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Success!

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More examples

Take a look at our open-sourced repository for more code examples:

Refer to the Wikipedia toy example which indexes some relevant articles from Wikipedia using the Indexing API.