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Perform a Text Query

Overview

In this guide, you can learn how to run a text query by using Laravel MongoDB.

You can use a text query to retrieve documents that contain a term or a phrase in a specified field. A term is a sequence of characters that excludes whitespace characters. A phrase is a sequence of terms with any number of whitespace characters.

This guide describes the Eloquent model methods that you can use to search text and provides examples. To learn more about Eloquent models in the Laravel Integration, see the Eloquent Models section.

Before You Get Started

To run the code examples in this guide, complete the Quick Start tutorial. This tutorial provides instructions on setting up a MongoDB Atlas instance with sample data and creating the following files in your Laravel web application:

Movie.php file, which contains a Movie model to represent documents in the movies collection
MovieController.php file, which contains a show() function to run database operations
browse_movies.blade.php file, which contains HTML code to display the results of database operations

The following sections describe how to edit the files in your Laravel application to run the find operation code examples and view the expected output.

Search Text Fields

Before you can perform a text query, you must create a text index on the text-valued field. To learn more about creating indexes, see the Manage Indexes section of the Schema Builder guide.

You can perform a text query by using the $text operator followed by the $search field in your query filter that you pass to the where() method. The $text operator performs a text query on the text-indexed fields. The $search field specifies the text to search for.

After building your query by using the where() method, chain the get() method to retrieve the query results.

This example calls the where() method on the Movie Eloquent model to retrieve documents in which the plot field contains the phrase "love story". To perform this text query, the collection must have a text index on the plot field.

Use the following syntax to specify the query:

$movies = Movie::where('$text', ['$search' => '"love story"'])
    ->get();

To see the query results in the browse_movies view, edit the show() function in the MovieController.php file to resemble the following code:

class MovieController
{
    public function show()
    {
         $movies = Movie::where('$text', ['$search' => '"love story"'])
             ->get();
         return view('browse_movies', [
             'movies' => $movies
         ]);
    }
}

Title: Cafè de Flore
Year: 2011
Runtime: 120
IMDB Rating: 7.4
IMDB Votes: 9663
Plot: A love story between a man and woman ...
Title: Paheli
Year: 2005
Runtime: 140
IMDB Rating: 6.7
IMDB Votes: 8909
Plot: A folk tale - supernatural love story about a ghost ...
Title: Por un puèado de besos
Year: 2014
Runtime: 98
IMDB Rating: 6.1
IMDB Votes: 223
Plot: A girl. A boy. A love story ...
...

Search Score

A text query assigns a numerical text score to indicate how closely each result matches the string in your query filter. You can sort the results by relevance by using the orderBy() method to sort on the textScore metadata field. You can access this metadata by using the $meta operator:

$movies = Movie::where('$text', ['$search' => '"love story"'])
    ->orderBy('score', ['$meta' => 'textScore'])
    ->get();

Tip

To learn more about the orderBy() method, see the Sort Query Results section of the Modify Query Output guide.

Additional Information

To view runnable code examples that demonstrate how to perform find operations by using the Laravel Integration, see the following usage examples:

To learn how to retrieve data based on filter criteria, see the Retrieve Data guide.

Back

Retrieve Data

Modify Query Results