plainleaf/website/Object Index.md

description, tags

description	tags
The local index that makes objects queryable.	glossary

The Object Index stores Object found in your Space.

You interact with it in a few ways:

• Indirectly via various other SilverBullet features such as Page Picker, Meta Picker, Linked Mention etc.
• Via the API/index API directly

Indexing

Initial indexing process

When you launch a fresh client for the first time, the object index will be built from scratch. Depending on the size of your space this can take anything between a few seconds and minutes. If the process takes longer than a few seconds, you will see progress with a blue status circle. Until this initial indexing process finishes, you will notice that things like API/widget and Space Lua/Integrated Query are not yet rendered, this is to avoid errors and invalid data.

After the initial index process, the index will be kept up-to-date incrementally.

To forcefully reindex your space, run the Space: Reindex command.

Indexing process

Objects are stored in your browser’s IndexedDB, implemented as a thin abstraction layer on top of API/datastore. Objects are always attached to a particular page.

When SilverBullet detects a page change (either via the editor or based on watching the file system for changes), it will queue reindexing the page.

This process follows the following steps:

1. Remove all existing page-connected objects from the database.
2. Parse the markdown, and broadcast it via the page:index event.
3. Various indexers do their magic, resulting in a list of found objects.
4. These objects are stored via the API/index#index.indexObjects(page, objects) API.

The indexObject API looks at the tags of the found objects, and for each tag:

• Looks up the tag spec (see API/tag#tag.define(spec))
• If the tag spec defines a schema and mustValidate is set to true, it will validate the object against the schema and only index the object if it passes. If mustValidate is not set (the default for performance reasons), no validation will happen at the indexing stage.
• If the tag spec defines a transform callback, it is invoked, see API/tag#Index augmentation for details.
• Stores the resulting objects with for the given tag

Query

The Object Index is generally queried using Space Lua/Integrated Query.

Entry points are:

• API/index#index.tag(name), e.g.: index.tag "page"
• tags.*: as a convenience — tags.page is equivalent to index.tag "page"

If a metatable is defined for a particular tag with API/tag#tag.define(spec), the metatable is set for each object for the tag.