Lucy::...utorial(3pm)

💖 Lucy::Docs::Tutorial::FieldTypeTutorial 💖

okay bestie, so this one lives in the Lucy::...utorial(3pm) corner of the User Contributed Perl Documentation universe, and it's literally about giving each field its own lil personality. no cap.

✨ NAME ✨

Lucy::Docs::Tutorial::FieldTypeTutorial — specify per-field properties and behaviors. yes, per-field. every field gets to be its own main character. 👑

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🌸 DESCRIPTION 🌸

so the Schema we built in the last chapter specifies three fields, right? here's the whole vibe:

my $type = Lucy::Plan::FullTextType->new(
    analyzer => $easyanalyzer,
);
$schema->spec_field( name => 'title',   type => $type );
$schema->spec_field( name => 'content', type => $type );
$schema->spec_field( name => 'url',     type => $type );

and because all three of them are defined as “full text” fields, they're all searchable — including the "url" field, which is honestly a dubious choice. 💀 like, some URLs do carry meaningful info, but these ones? these ones really don't:

http://example.com/us_constitution/amend1.txt

it's giving nothing. so we may as well not bother indexing the URL content at all. and to make that happen, we gotta assign the "url" field to a different FieldType. slay.

🧵 StringType 🧵

so instead of FullTextType, we're gonna use a StringType. the difference? a StringType doesn't use an Analyzer to break up text into individual fields. and not only that — we're marking this StringType as unindexed, so its content won't be searchable at all. zero. nada. 🙈

my $url_type = Lucy::Plan::StringType->new( indexed => 0 );
$schema->spec_field( name => 'url', type => $url_type );

wanna observe the change in behavior with your own two eyes? try searching for "us_constitution" both before and after changing the Schema and re-indexing. it's a whole before/after glow-up moment, fr fr. ✨

💅 Toggling ‘stored’ 💅

for a lil taste of what else FieldType can do, try turning off "stored" for one or more fields. go wild.

my $content_type = Lucy::Plan::FullTextType->new(
    analyzer => $easyanalyzer,
    stored   => 0,
);

so here's the tea: turning off "stored" for either "title" or "url" mangles our results page 😭 (do not recommend), but since we're not actually displaying "content" anywhere, turning it off for "content" has no effect — except on index size. tiny win, we'll take it. 🫶

🔍 Analyzers up next 🔍

Analyzers play a crucial role in the behavior of FullTextType fields. like, they're the whole vibe honestly. in our next tutorial chapter, AnalysisTutorial, we'll see how changing up the Analyzer changes search results. 👀

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and that's the whole page, bestie!! 🦋 this was Lucy::...utorial(3pm) from perl v5.42.0, dated 2025-07-25 — mwah, iconic, periodt. 💖✨🎀