Comparison to regular search
Comparison to regular search
At the surface the Metadata Query API seems very similar to the Search for content API, but there are several important differences in how they operate. At a high level the Metadata Query API is optimized for exactness and throughput, while regular search is optimized for relevance to a human user.
Deep comparison
| Metadata Query API | Search API | |
|---|---|---|
| What is indexed? | This API only returns files/folders based on the values in the metadata templates that are searched. | This API returns files, folders and web links based on values in the item names, descriptions, contents (up to the first 10,000 bytes) as well as the associated metadata template instances. |
| Indexing time | This API returns accurate results as soon as metadata has been added, removed, updated or deleted for a file or folder. | This API is subject to a search indexing delay, which is typically 10 minutes, yet may be longer in some cases. This means that items may not be returned for more than 10 minutes after metadata has been updated. |
| Matching | This API uses exact matching based on SQL conventions. Results are returned based on a specified sort order. | This API uses fuzzy matching and may return results that vary based on string tokenization, removal of special characters, and other search concepts. Result order is based on either relevance or the updated date of the item. |
| Conditional logic | This API supports multi-part boolean expressions with comparison operators. | This API has limited support for querying by metadata. It only supports querying 1 metadata template at a time and only allows simple query operations. |
| Response type | This API returns both the matched file/folder and the associated metadata matched by the query. | This API only returns the matched item. A subsequent API call is needed to return each item's metadata. |
| Throughput | This API is currently subject to per-user rate limits and to a 10 requests per second per enterprise limit. | This API supports 6 searches per second per user, up to 60 searches per minute and 12 searches per second per enterprise. |
| Scale | This API has no limit on the number of items with the specified metadata template that can be returned. It is recommended to only send queries which match no more than 2,000 results. | This API has no limit on number of items with the specified metadata template that can be returned, yet the response time increases significantly as the number of items matching the search grows. This API does have a limit of up to 10 million results for a query. It is recommended to only send queries which match no more than 50,000 results. |
| Scope | This API is always limited to the content to which the user has access | This API may be either limited to the content to which the user has access (user_content) or to all content in the enterprise (enterprise_content). |
Scenarios
The following are some example scenarios that may help you decide what API to use.
Searching an entire enterprise for a term
You want to find all content in an enterprise with content or metadata that
matches the keyword Guarantee.
In this case the Search API is recommended. This API matches terms in both content and metadata, and can be scoped to find all content in the entire enterprise.
Searching for multiple metadata values
You want to find all documents with the metadata template Contract having a
value greater than $100,000, a renewal date in 2019, and which are not associated
with account number 1234.
In this case the Metadata Query API is recommended. With a metadata query you can write boolean expressions that evaluate multiple fields in a metadata template, such as a number, a date, and a string.
Mixing metadata and content search
You want to find all documents with the metadata template Contract having a
value greater than $100,000, renewal date in 2019, which are not associated with
account number 1234, and which contain the term “Sale” in the title or document
body.
This scenarios is currently not supported. At the moment neither of the APIs supports mixing both fuzzy search (searching for "Sale") and the boolean expression matching metadata fields.