Question: Understanding section.entry-type?

[phillipsandoveracademy]

I am running 5.7.2.1 and trying to understand what section.entry-type is doing in the collection code.

'section' => ['page.oneColumn','page.twoColumn', 'news.default'], //section handle + entry type handle

At top we can specify the specific sections and entry-types.

->criteria(function(\craft\elements\db\EntryQuery $query) { return $query->section(['page','news']); }),

At bottom, the query runs based on the sections array.

I have found in the entries sent to Typesense, a section entry-type not specified in the top section array. Is this an error? or expected behavior?

Thanks!

[linear]

DEV-3833

[jamie-s-white]

Please note, I am not the developer of this plugin, however, I may be able to offer some insight.

The section configuration in config/typesense.php is used to match against individual elements when they are saved to determine if they should be updated in the Typesense index or not.

The criteria configuration is used to determine what is included in the full sync or flush events, usually triggered from admin/typesense/collections or from the console commands typesense/default/sync or typesense/default/flush.

It should be noted of course that these two things are not necessarily the same, and so if you are not careful, your section configuration and criteria yield different results, which means that elements that are included in one function are not included in other.

For example, with the configuration you've given, if you have entry types other than oneColumn and twoColumn in your page section, or entry types other than default in your news section, then, when you do a full sync, those entry types will be indexed in Typesense, whereas they are not when updated individually.

You can of course also further restrict your element query to specific entry types to bring both of these configurations into better lockstep with each other, or, update your section configuration to be ['page.all', 'news.all'].

When we use this plugin with on our own projects, we have always included all entry types in all sections, and so our configuration has become:

$mainSearchSections = [ 'pages', 'events', 'jobs', ];

'section' => array_map(function (&$value) {return $value.'.all';}, $mainSearchSections), // Add .all to the end of all section handles

->criteria( function (\craft\elements\db\EntryQuery $query) use ($mainSearchSections) { return $query->section($mainSearchSections); } ),

In this way, we know that we just have to update the $mainSearchSections, and it updates both the section configuration and criteria, both stay in lockstep, and we don't get one function producing different results than the other.

Hope this helps!

[jamie-s-white]

Please note, I have now made a PR to completely remove the section configuration and instead run all corresponding functionality through an extension of the criteria configuration.

If accepted, this should solve the bugs listed.