4.6 Query Language

4.6.1 Introduction

The Daisy Query Language can be used to search for documents (more precisely, document variants). In the Daisy Wiki, queries can be used in various places:

• explicitly via the "Query Search" page
• embedded inside documents
• embedded inside navigation trees

The implementation of various Daisy Wiki features is also based on queries, such as the recent changes page or the referrers page. And of course it is possible to execute queries from your own applications, using the HTTP interface or Java API.

The query language is a somewhat SQL-like language that allows to search on various document properties (including the fields), fulltext on the part content, or a combination of those. The sort order of the results can also be defined. The resulting document list is filtered to only include documents to which the user has read access.

An example query, searching all documents in a collection call "mycollection":

select id, name where InCollection('mycollection') order by name

Internally, non-fulltext queries are translated to SQL and executed on the relational database while fulltext queries are executed by Jakarta Lucene.

Although the query language is somewhat SQL-like, it hides the complexity of the actual SQL-queries that are performed by the repository server on the relational database, which can quickly grow quite complex.

Note: every time in this document when we talk about "searching documents", this is equivalent to "searching document variants". The result of query is a set of document variants, i.e. each member of the result set is identified by a triple (document ID, branch, language).