About the parentId property

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In this article

Define parent-child relationships
Leverage parentId-generated fields in nested queries

When adding or updating items in a Push source, you can use the parentId property to define parent-child relationships between those items. Doing so populates a set of fields that you can leverage in nested queries.

Note

Using the parentId property doesn’t populate any field that would allow you to load the parent of a folded collection.

If you want to request and render folded results from a Push source, you should therefore rather define your parent-child relationships by sending metadata to populate the standard folding fields in your index (that is, @foldingcollection, @foldingparent, and @foldingchild).

Define parent-child relationships

You can use the parentId property to define simple parent-child relationships between items in a Push source.

To do so:

If an item is the parent of a relationship, set its parentId to its own documentId.
If an item is a child in a relationship, set its parentId to the documentId of its parent.

Specifying a parentId when pushing an item always populates the @topparentid field for that item.

If the parentId value differs from the documentId value of the pushed item, the @attachmentparentid field gets populated as well.

Example

In a Push source, you want to define simple parent-child relationships between items representing directors and movies.

You create a file container.

Request definition

POST https://api.cloud.coveo.com/push/v1/organizations/coveomovieorganization/files HTTP/1.1

Authorization: Bearer **********-****-****-****-************

You upload a batch of items into the file container you previously created, using the parentId property to define the desired relationships.

Request definition

PUT https://coveo-nprod-customerdata.s3.amazonaws.com/proda/blobstore/coveomovieorganization/2a65f989-2371-4dc6-b6aa-198b5b88ff29?x-amz-security-token=FQoGZXIvYXdzEB8aDL37SykFY6%2FzbYBDPCLlAQmJ0nWbMK0Bxq3wcGnEq1bPcDGsP7dTaKkuuAPOA7LaNZhosW3d8ybg14N8o9OAaUS%2BoQ9Y1oZROmh%2BHZbP7krJAlDRUQS2NtrGxUh20h3GInWxTM5CZ86p5een1Gzsk%2FuCrKCXpqGFJZ1UwEFkEGtj2M2l%2F3eOhfPd6ga9%2F51NgHQPXRc4z%2F5NLiEfWlv%2FxzLZHrtznCjj8fi77QKcLkzO9kiLOtWtZVxmoMg4jVZYwZuOdfRqAVEzaWIsP8lQ2O5AWTwD5O8HKjmtO6v%2FZiV9diYDx7Z7WtrKJg1v2upFHhxljxUo6%2BCG2wU%3D&AWSAccessKeyId=ASIAYKDJLZIT5VRAMAJE&Expires=1533134515&Signature=fyZW7rDLYWSt%2B6rRTPaQPc72uUY%3D HTTP/1.1

Content-Type: application/octet-stream
x-amz-server-side-encryption: "AES256"

Request body

{
  "addOrUpdate": [
    {
      "title": "Edgar Wright",
      "data": "...",
      "documentId": "file://directors/edgar-wright.txt",
      "parentId": "file://directors/edgar-wright.txt",
      "documenttype": "Director"
    },
    {
      "title": "The World's End",
      "data": "...",
      "documentId": "file://movies/the-world-s-end.txt",
      "parentId": "file://directors/edgar-wright.txt",
      "documenttype": "Movie"
    },
    {
      "title": "Baby Driver",
      "data": "...",
      "documentId": "file://movies/baby-driver.txt",
      "parentId": "file://directors/edgar-wright.txt",
      "documenttype": "Movie"
    },
    {
      "title": "Stanley Kubrick",
      "data": "...",
      "documentId": "file://directors/stanley-kubrick.txt",
      "parentId": "file://directors/stanley-kubrick.txt",
      "documenttype": "Director"
    },
    {
      "title": "The Shining",
      "data": "...",
      "documentId": "file://movies/the-shining.txt",
      "parentId": "file://directors/stanley-kubrick.txt",
      "documenttype": "Movie"
    }
  ],
  "delete": []
}

You push the file container to your source.

Request definition

POST https://api.cloud.coveo.com/push/v1/organizations/coveomovieorganization/sources/vzievcixq66qq5q6xulpy32dqi-coveomovieorganization/documents/batch?fileId=b5e8767e-8f0d-4a89-9095-1127915c89c7 HTTP/1.1

Authorization: Bearer **********-****-****-****-************

When the indexing pipeline finishes processing the batch, the @topparentid and @attachmentparentid fields are populated as follows:

Item title	Document type	`@topparentid` value	`@attachmentparentid` value
Edgar Wright	Director	32345	N/A
Stanley Kubrick	Director	32338	N/A
The World’s End	Movie	32345	32345
Baby Driver	Movie	32345	32345
The Shining	Movie	32338	32338

Leverage parentId-generated fields in nested queries

The @topparentid and @attachmentparentid numeric fields can be useful in nested queries.

Leading practice

Ensure that the Use cache for numeric queries field parameter is enabled for nested query fields (see Add or edit a field). Doing so will allow for quicker numeric operations (for example, comparing integers), making query executions faster.

Example

When querying items from the Push source described in the Defining parent-child relationships example, you could use the following nested query to retrieve all movies by director Edgar Wright:

[[@attachmentparentid] @topparentid==32345]

Query response excerpt

{
  "totalCount": 2,
  ...
  "results": [
    {
      "title": "Baby Driver",
      "uri": "file://movies/baby-driver.txt",
      ...
      "raw": {
        ...
        "attachmentparentid": 32345,
        "topparentid": 32345,
        ...
      }
      ...
    },
    {
      "title": "The World's End",
      "uri": "file://movies/the-world-s-end.txt",
      ...
      "raw": {
        ...
        "attachmentparentid": 32345,
        "topparentid": 32345,
        ...
      }
      ...
    }
  ]
}