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Properties

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Introduction

Properties contain the actual data inside a node. Properties use a key-value format

The key must be unique within the node, and the value must have a specific valueType, such as String, or GeoPoint.

Property anatomy

Examples of what a property might look like:

mytext = "a string"
mynumber = 1

Some characters are illegal in a property key. Here’s a list of illegal characters:

  • _ is system reserved prefix

  • . is the path separator.

  • [ and ] are array index indicators.

Properties may also be nested, making the key a path. Elements in the path are separated by . (dot).

Here’s an example of properties with arrays and nested properties.

first-name = "Thomas"
cities = ["Oslo", "San Francisco"]
city.location = geoPoint('37.785146,-122.39758')
person.age = 39
person.birth-date = localDate("1975-17-10")

In the example above, the property person is of the value type Set. Sets are special in the way that they don’t hold actual values, but rather act as containers for other properties.

Value types

Each property has a specific value type. These are the primitive data types in the XP storage The value type enables the data storage to handle both validation and indexing of the property.

Below is the complete list of all supported value-types.

Value Type Example Default indexing Comment

String

My String

text

String of characters within UTF charset

BinaryReference

a-binary-reference

text

Handle for accessing a binary

Boolean

true

text

A value representing true or false

Double

11.5

number, text

Double-precision 64-bit IEEE 754 floating point.

GeoPoint

59.9090442,10.7423389

geoPoint, text

Represents a geographical point on earth, given in latitude and longitude.

Instant

2015-03-16T10:00:02Z

datetime, text

A single point on the time-line (may include subsecond up to 9 digits).

LocalTime

10:00:03

text

A time representation without date or timezone(nor subsecond).

LocalDate

2015-03-16

datetime, text

A date representation. Will be indexed with UTC timezone offset.

LocalDateTime

2015-03-16T10:00:02

datetime, text

A date-time representation without timezone. Will be indexed with UTC timezone offset.

Long

1234

number, text

64-bit two’s complement integer.

Reference

0b7f7720-6ab1-4a37-8edc-731b7e4f439e

text

Holds a reference to other nodes in the same repository.

Set

Not indexed

Holds sub properties as it’s value

XML

<some>xml</some>

text

Any valid XML

Indexing

When a node is persisted, its property values are indexed instantly. A single property can be indexed multiple times — each index is referred to as an index mapping. The default mapping XP applies to a property depends on its value type (see the Default indexing column above).

The available mappings:

text

Default mapping for any value type. Stores the value for exact match.

number

Effectively handles any numeric value.

datetime

Handles any date value.

geoPoint

Supports earth-based geographical locations.

ngram

Indexes all substrings from 2 to 25 characters of a string. Accessed via the nGram query function.

analyzed

Splits a string into tokens for free-text search. Used by the fulltext query function.

stemmed

Language-optimised version of analyzed. Tokens are reduced to their stem so plural and gender-specific endings still match.

path

Indexes path elements (split on /) as separate tokens.

orderby

Generated automatically for every indexed property. Used to sort text and numbers in a natural way.

XP also maintains a system property called _allText that aggregates the text content of all indexed string properties on a node — useful for "search everything" queries.

Applications can override the default mappings per property via the _indexConfig system property. For the full configuration reference — config options, templates, property-path patterns, and the language list for stemming — see Indexing.

System Properties

In order to separate system defined properties from user defined properties, _ (underscore) has been reserved as a starting character for the system properties.

Core properties

System Property Value Type Indexing Comment

_id

String

string

Holds the unique id of the node, typically a UUID

_name

String

string

Holds the name of the node. Must be unique within its scope (nodes with same parent)

_parentPath

String

string

Reference to parent node path

_path

String

path, string

Dynamic property resolved from parent path + node name

_childOrder

String

string

Default ordering of children when using getChildren()

_manualOrderValue

Long

number, string

Numeric order value used for the builtin manual ordering

Versioning properties

_state

String

string

Used for keeping state of a node in a branch

_ts

datetime, string

The last time this node was modified

_versionKey

string

For every change to a node, a unique versionKey is generated

Indexing properties

System Property Value Type Indexing Comment

_nodeType

string

string

Used to create collections of nodes in a repository

_indexConfig

string

Not indexed

Node specific index configuration

_allText

String

string, analyzed, ngram

Aggregates text across other string properties in the node

_references

Reference

string

Aggregates all reference properties in the node

Node permissions are also flattened into indexed permissions* system properties at write time. See Permissions — Querying by permission for the full list and usage.

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