Add, Update, or Delete Documents (Preview REST API)
Important
This API reference is for a legacy version. See Data plane REST operations for updated reference documentation. Use the filter on the top left to select a version.
Applies to: 2023-07-01-Preview. This version is no longer supported. Upgrade immediately to a newer version.
Important
2023-07-01-Preview adds:
- Support for vector fields in a document.
You can push documents that contain vector fields into a specified index using HTTP POST. For a large update, batching (up to 1000 documents per batch, or about 16 MB per batch) improves indexing performance.
POST https://[service name].search.windows.net/indexes/[index name]/docs/index?api-version=2023-07-01-Preview
Content-Type: application/json
api-key: [admin key]
URI Parameters
| Parameter | Description |
|---|---|
| service name | Required. Set this value to the unique, user-defined name of your search service. |
| index name | Required. Set this value to the name of index receiving the documents. You can only post documents to one index at a time. |
| api-version | See API versions for more versions. |
Request Headers
The following table describes the required and optional request headers.
| Fields | Description |
|---|---|
| Content-Type | Required. Set this value to application/json |
| api-key | Optional if you're using Azure roles and a bearer token is provided on the request, otherwise a key is required. An api-key is a unique, system-generated string that authenticates the request to your search service. Uploading documents requires an admin API key. See Connect to Azure AI Search using key authentication for details. |
Request Body
The body of the request contains one or more documents to be indexed. Documents are uniquely identified through a case-sensitive key. Each document is associated with an action: "upload", "delete", "merge", or "mergeOrUpload". Upload requests must include the document data as a set of key/value pairs.
Vector fields are of type Collection(Edm.Single). Vector data consists of an array of single-precision floating point numbers.
Vector fields can contain thousands of embeddings, depending on the complexity, length, or type of the original content. Azure AI Search doesn't convert content to embeddings. The documents that you push into an index must contain embeddings that you've previously generated.
{
"value": [
{
"@search.action": "upload (default) | merge | mergeOrUpload | delete",
"key_field_name": "unique_key_of_document", (key/value pair for key field from index schema)
"field_name": field_value (key/value pairs matching index schema),
"vector_field_name": [ array of single-precision floating point numbers ]
...
},
...
]
}
| Property | Description |
|---|---|
| @search.action | Required. Valid values are "upload", "delete", "merge", or "mergeOrUpload". Defaults to "upload". |
| key_field_name | Required. A field definition in the index that serves as the document key and contains only unique values. Document keys can only contain letters, numbers, dashes ("-"), underscores ("_"), and equal signs ("=") and are case-sensitive. |
| field_name | Required. Name-value pairs, where the name of the field corresponds to a field name in the index definition. The value is user-defined but must be valid for the field type. |
Response
Status code: 200 is returned for a successful response, meaning that all items have been stored durably and that indexing has begun. Indexing runs in the background and makes new documents available (that is, queryable and searchable) a few seconds after the indexing operation completed.
Successful indexing is indicated when the status property set to true for all items. The statusCode property should be either 201 (for newly uploaded documents) or 200 (for merged or deleted documents).
Examples
Example: Upload two documents with text and vector content
For readability, the following example shows a subset of documents and embeddings. The body of the Upload Documents request consists of 108 documents, each with a full set of embeddings for "titleVector" and "contentVector".
POST https://{{search-service-name}}.search.windows.net/indexes/{{index-name}}/docs/index?api-version={{api-version}}
Content-Type: application/json
api-key: {{admin-api-key}}
{
"value": [
{
"id": "1",
"title": "Azure App Service",
"content": "Azure App Service is a fully managed platform for building, deploying, and scaling web apps. You can host web apps, mobile app backends, and RESTful APIs. It supports a variety of programming languages and frameworks, such as .NET, Java, Node.js, Python, and PHP. The service offers built-in auto-scaling and load balancing capabilities. It also provides integration with other Azure services, such as Azure DevOps, GitHub, and Bitbucket.",
"category": "Web",
"titleVector": [
-0.02250031754374504,
. . .
],
"contentVector": [
-0.024740582332015038,
. . .
],
"@search.action": "upload"
},
{
"id": "2",
"title": "Azure Functions",
"content": "Azure Functions is a serverless compute service that enables you to run code on-demand without having to manage infrastructure. It allows you to build and deploy event-driven applications that automatically scale with your workload. Functions support various languages, including C#, F#, Node.js, Python, and Java. It offers a variety of triggers and bindings to integrate with other Azure services and external services. You only pay for the compute time you consume.",
"category": "Compute",
"titleVector": [
-0.020159931853413582,
. . .
],
"contentVector": [
-0.02780858241021633,,
. . .
],
"@search.action": "upload"
}
. . .
]
}
Note
When you upload DateTimeOffset values with time zone information to your index, Azure AI Search normalizes these values to UTC. For example, 2019-01-13T14:03:00-08:00 will be stored as 2019-01-13T22:03:00Z. If you need to store time zone information, add an extra column to your index.