Creating Parent-Child Relationships

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
• Add children without affecting parents or other children
• Index a tree-like data structure
• Model a one-to-many relationship.

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.

Dataset

1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12
[
   {
      "parentID":"ABC",
      "parentName":"Parent",
      "name":"Child One"
   },
   {
      "parentID":"ABC",
      "parentName":"Parent",
      "name":"Child Two"
   }
]

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).