Partially updating a document

Use the PATCH method on the base URL of the Ingestion API to update one or more attribute values in an index document.

Important

When an administrator recrawls a pull source, either manually or through scheduled crawls, Search updates all index documents with the latest data from your original content. This action overwrites any updates you made through Ingestion API if they aren't also applied to the original content. To prevent this, we recommend that you always update the original content with changes made through the Ingestion API. This synchronization ensures that your modifications are maintained in future crawls.

To use the Ingestion API to partially update a document, make a PATCH call to the Partial Update Document endpoint.

For the data model of this method and a description of objects and keys, see the Ingestion API reference. You can view your base URL in the Developer Resources section of Search.

Note

The PUT (update) and PATCH (partially update) methods differ. Use PUT (update) when you want Sitecore Search to replace all fields with the values you pass and delete fields you do not pass. Use PATCH when you want Search to replace the fields you pass and leave other fields as-is.

For example, an index document exists with the title, description, and image_URL fields. If you pass a PUT call with only the title and description fields, Search assumes that you want to do two things - update the title and description fields and delete the image_URL field. If you pass a PATCH call with only the title and description fields, Search updates these fields and does not modify any other field.

You can partially update or delete documents in one, some, or all locales. To update or delete documents in more than one locale, in the request URL, pass the locales separated by an ampersand (&). For example, to partially update or delete documents in the English (US) and Japanese (Japan) locales, use locale=en_us&locale=ja_jp. To partially update or delete all locales, pass locale=all.

You can partially update or delete more than one locale at a time because index documents for multiple locales share the same index document ID. This is so that users don't see duplicate results and only see content that is relevant to their locale. You configure this when you set up the crawler source or create documents with the Ingestion API.

For example, you want to update the image_url attribute for index documents in two locales.

Here is a sample PATCH cURL call:

RequestResponse

curl --location 'https://<base-url>/domains/<domainID>/sources/<sourceID>/entities/<entity>/documents/<documentID>?locale=<locale1>&locale=<locale2>' \
--header 'Content-Type: application/json' \
--header 'Authorization: <api-key>' \
--data '{
    "document": {
        "id": "test_id_123",
        "fields": {
        "image_url": "www.newimageURL.com"
        }
    }
}' \
-X PATCH

If your request is successful, you get a 200 response with this body:

RequestResponse

{
    "enqueued": true
}

In the response, enqueued means that Search has added this document to its indexing queue. After a few minutes, you'll see the updated index document in the Content Collection section of Search.

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