ELLQL Language Features

ELLQL queries look like this:

#operator{options}(argument)

where:

• operator - specifies the type of the field on which the query is applied. For example, operator may have one of the following values (all possible values are described afterward): #alphanum, #num, #category, etc. operator may also represent the way fields are compounded (#and, #near, etc.). .
• options - related to the operator. They may be written as a comma-separated list of values or key=value. options are optional.
• argument - may be any kind of string composed of: lower/upper case letters, digits, and underscore. The only restriction is that an argument cannot begin with a digit. For simple queries, argument generally represents the name of the field and the value of the query. argument may also be a query itself, and in that case, we talk of a compound operator.

The following option is applicable to all ELLQL nodes:

hl=0 - deactivates search result highlighting and summary for a specific node and its children if any.

An operator operator may take as option any (key, value) pair, in the form of key=value, where:

• key formatting is the same as for operator arguments (see above)
• and value may be a numerical value (int or float) or a string

Then, two cases may occur:

• key is a known option of operator. In that case, operator uses the (key, value) pair to perform its action. Known options are listed afterward for each operator. While these known options differ from one operator to another, the (slice, int) option is common to every operator. It restricts the scope of the query to a specific slice for the current node.
• key is not known. (key, value) is then called by a node property and may be used for scoring operations.