Transform lat/lng from collection to meilisearch _geo attribute

[preeco-privacy]

Hi,

in order to use meilisearch's proximity search feature i try to add the necessary _geo attribute (https://docs.meilisearch.com/learn/advanced/geosearch.html#preparing-documents-for-location-based-search) to the documents. The statamic collection already has fields latitude and longitude but they need to be transformed to a _geo array.

My first try was something like this.. but didnt work...

'transformers' => [
                'longitude' => function ($longitude) {
                    return [
                        '_geo' => [
                            'lng' => $longitude
                        ]
                    ];
                },
                'latitude' => function ($latitude) {
                    return [
                        '_geo' => [
                            'lat' => $latitude
                        ]
                    ];
                },
            ],

Any idea would be appreciated...

Thx,

Andreas

[tao]

My first idea would be to use a ViewModel but it seems like it's not called before Search Indexing. We could ask Statamic to enable that but it might take a while. Instead we could add a config field like geosearch => true and then build the _geo field when we are preparing the default fields to be indexed. I'll work on an update this week.

[tao]

We could do something like this:

        'articles' => [
            'driver' => 'meilisearch',
            'searchables' => ['collection:articles'],
            'fields' => ['title', 'content'],
            'geosearch' => true,
        ],

Then in the Index class add something like this:

    public function insert($document)
    {
        $fields = array_merge(
            $this->searchables()->fields($document),
            $this->getDefaultFields($document),
            $this->getGeoFields($document),
        );
        $this->getIndex()->updateDocuments([$fields]);
    }
    
    private function getGeoFields(Entry|Term|LocalizedTerm|Asset|User $entry)
    {
        if ($this->config()['geosearch']) {
            return [
                'lat' => $this->get('latitude'),
                'lng' => $entry->get('longitude'),
            ];
        }
    }

With some kind of options to change the latitude / longitude field names and maybe format them to a specific decimal place??

It's quite a tricky problem...

[preeco-privacy]

Hi @tao

thx for the inspirations! I ended up with adding a _geo to my Statamic collection which holds the lat and lng values separated by comma. So the transformer was easy to set up:

 'transformers' => [
                '_geo' => function ($_geo) {
                    $latlng = explode(',', $_geo);
                    return [
                        '_geo' => [
                            'lat' => (float) $latlng[0],
                            'lng' => (float) $latlng[1]
                        ]
                    ];
                },

[tao]

Great, I think long term that ViewModels would be the best solution as it allows more customisation in the future without modifying the search driver for every new change or feature that MeiliSearch makes, so I'll raise that idea with Statamic instead of changing the codebase now.