Demystifying Oak Search Part 4: Included / Query Paths | AEM Community Blog Seeding

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Demystifying Oak Search Part 4: Included / Query Paths by Daniel Klco

Abstract

One of the common mistakes I've seen in customizing Oak Lucene Indexes is with the included/query paths feature. To understand why this is a common area for mistakes and what impact this has, you have to understand what the includedPaths and queryPaths configurations do.

When executing an Oak query, you can supply constraints in the form of node types, property values or paths. As discussed previously, to write a fast query, you must narrowly constrain the set of nodes your your query may apply to. Therefore, it’s best to always use a path constraint so only a portion of the JCR needs to be included. This is especially important of you need to run a query against a generic node type such as nt:base or nt:hierarchyNode as constraining to a specific path can eliminate thousands of nodes that would otherwise need to be evaluated.


How Path Restrictions Work in Oak Indexes

If you set the property evaluatePathRestrictions=true on your index, your index will use the path restriction to filter out nodes without having to traverse the nodes.

There are two main properties to configure which paths are relevant to the index. The trick is that the Query Engine only cares about one when picking the index to use.

includedPaths - used to configure what nodes will be included in the index at indexing time. This property is not used by the query engine when picking the index
queryPaths - this property is used at query time by the Query Engine to determine if the path constraints for the query include the paths for the index.
For example, if I ran a query like: SELECT * FROM [dam:Asset] WHERE ISDESCENDANTPATH([/content/dam/testfolder]) OPTION(LIMIT 10) the query engine would pick an index with queryPaths=/content/dam but not queryPaths=/content/dam/prodfolder
If you mismatch these values, the Query Engine will match your index for paths not contained in the index. Because the Query Engine uses the estimated count of nodes matching the query from the index evaluation to determine which index to use, this can mean that your index may even override OOTB index. This is because an index with a restrictive includedPaths (e.g. /content/dam/custom) and a permissive queryPaths (e.g. /content) will look like if filters out more non-matching results simply because it doesn't contain them.

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Demystifying Oak Search Part 4: Included / Query Paths

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