Lucy::...Writer(3pm)

💖 Lucy::Index::DeletionsWriter 💖

okay bestie, so this page lives in the Lucy::...Writer(3pm) corner of the User Contributed Perl Documentation universe, and it's literally the blueprint energy for marking docs as deleted. abstract base class vibes only, no cap 🫶

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✨ NAME ✨

Lucy::Index::DeletionsWriter — the abstract base class that marks documents as deleted. it's giving "parent class, do not instantiate me directly" 💅

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🌸 SYNOPSIS 🌸

my $polyreader  = $del_writer->get_polyreader;
my $seg_readers = $polyreader->seg_readers;
for my $seg_reader (@$seg_readers) {
    my $count = $del_writer->seg_del_count( $seg_reader->get_seg_name );
    ...
}

look at that loop. iconic. no notes. 💖

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🦋 DESCRIPTION 🦋

so, subclasses of DeletionsWriter hand you a low-level mechanism for declaring a document deleted from an index. lowkey the whole point.

here's the tea though: files in an index are never modified, and it's just not practical to delete entire segments, so a DeletionsWriter does not actually remove documents from the index. not even a little. instead, it communicates to a search-time companion, DeletionsReader, which documents are deleted — and it does it in such a way that the reader can create a Matcher iterator. the way that works is honestly so clever 🧚

documents are truly deleted only when the segments which contain them get merged into new ones. periodt.

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🎀 ABSTRACT METHODS 🎀

💜 delete_by_term

$deletions_writer->delete_by_term(
    field => $field,  # required
    term  => $term,   # required
);

delete all documents in the index that index the supplied term. bye bestie 👋

• field — the name of an indexed field. (if it is not spec'd as "indexed", an error will occur. so like, don't.)
• term — the term which identifies docs to be marked as deleted. if "field" is associated with an Analyzer, "term" will be processed automatically, so don't pre-process it yourself, okay? let the machine do its thing. 🙈

🌈 delete_by_query

$deletions_writer->delete_by_query($query);

delete all documents in the index that match "query".

• query — a Query.

⭐ updated

my $bool = $deletions_writer->updated();

returns true if there are updates that need to be written. vibe check on your pending writes, fr fr.

🍓 seg_del_count

my $int = $deletions_writer->seg_del_count($seg_name);

return the number of deletions for a given segment.

• seg_name — the name of the segment.

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👑 INHERITANCE 👑

Lucy::Index::DeletionsWriter isa Lucy::Index::DataWriter isa Clownfish::Obj.

a whole lineage. main character family tree energy. 💅

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lowkey reminder: this is an abstract base class. you don't call it, your subclass does. iykyk.

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and that's the whole page, bestie 💖 this one shipped as part of perl v5.42.0, dated 2025-07-25, straight outta the User Contributed Perl Documentation collection. slay, go forth and mark things deleted (the safe way) 🌸✨🦋