Using Multi Search after merging to Laravel Scout

[GeorgThomassen]

No idea if this is the right place to ask, but;

This driver has been merged upstream to the Laravel Scout repository, however it seems the Laravel team has no intention of implementing multi search for any of the drivers, including Typesense. How would you recommend one to do federated/multi search? Use the driver from this repository or?

Thanks in advance

[samuelhautcoeur]

Also interested to know if there's any clean workaround.

[moussaclarke]

Also have this requirement so have been digging into the libraries a bit to see if there's a lower level undocumented workaround without falling back to this driver.

If we look at the Laravel Scout core typesense engine we can see that it proxies methods dynamically onto the underlying client:
https://github.com/laravel/scout/blob/8af517e61e88c423b9e9b466713e5f3a56e588ac/src/Engines/TypesenseEngine.php#L534

This means we can get hold of the client multisearch by doing this:
$multiSearch = app(Laravel\Scout\EngineManager::class)->engine('typesense')->getMultiSearch();

We can then call perform on this and pass in our query similarly to https://github.com/typesense/laravel-scout-typesense-driver?tab=readme-ov-file#multi-search - syntax slightly different e.g. $multiSearch->perform(['searches' => $searchRequests, $options]);

See https://github.com/typesense/typesense-php/blob/4e41737b4ee416e6b2041f81f5506bdac7c823b2/src/MultiSearch.php#L39 for the signature and how it's implemented in the client.

Bear in mind as this is lower level you won't get a lot of the magic, e.g. youll be getting a simple array back rather than a builder instance, so you won't have paginateRaw without implementing it yourself, if you're using SCOUT_PREFIX you would need to add that to your collection names manually, etc

(Edits for clarity)

[mauricekindermann]

What a shame this was removed. Elastic/Swiftype have started timing out our API so I needed a quick solution. Spent all day getting scout setup for the first time, got everythink completed, even docker in production, but not being able to blend eloquent models is a real hole that every other hosted search solution provides. Really need to be able to search across multiple models.

Think about a google result, it always blends multiple types together, this is the standard users expect.

[Braunson]

I wonder if a PR would be accepted or even entertained for multiSearch support now and wonder why it was removed in the first place?

[mauricekindermann]

I ended up not using multi-search, I found a nice way to keep them separated, and I was under too much time pressure with Elastic/Swiftype's API becomign unavailable.

Aaron Francis's video on Typesense was a nice starter on using the Typesense API directly which I used heavily. I'm pretty sure I could re-organize my typesense database if I neded too to simply normalize all the model collection-schema code, then add a 'type' attribute to distinguish between them - then in theory you could just the whole lot at once.

From my understanding Typesense itself seems to only do Federated/Multi search at the model stylev level, so this might be why it it's not available - but. I guess it is possible if you're fine with bending over backwards to support it.

If there is a way to blend/mix the models without needing this I hope someone posts it!