If your source data has parent-child relationships between records and you want to maintain those relationships when you migrate to Algolia’s JSON format, this guide outlines the recommended indexing process. Use parent-child relationships when you want to:
  • Filter on children
  • Update parents without affecting children
  • Index a tree-like data structure
  • Model a one-to-many relationship.

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Modeling the relationship in your JSON file

To model a parent-child relationship in the records of your Algolia JSON data:
  • Create one record per child, and add a unique reference to their parent as a key-value pair (parentID in the example)
  • Don’t create records for parents.

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Dataset

json
[
  {
    "parentID": "ABC",
    "parentName": "Parent",
    "name": "Child One"
  },
  {
    "parentID": "ABC",
    "parentName": "Parent",
    "name": "Child Two"
  }
]

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Implementation notes

Since:
  • You don’t have any parent records: you can only query children.
  • A parent may have many children: use Algolia’s distinct feature to retrieve the most relevant child per parent (parentID in the preceding example).