Amazon CloudSearch: Is it possible to write a query that returns... everything?

Question

I've put together a simple search form, with a search box and a couple of filters as dropdowns. Everything works as you'd expect, except that I want the behavior to be that when the user leaves everything completely blank (no search query, no filters) they simply get everything returned (paginated of course).

I'm currently achieving this by detecting this special case and querying my local database, but there are some advantages to doing it 100% with CloudSearch. Is there a way to build a request that simply returns a paginated list of every document? In other words, is there a CloudSearch equivalent to "SELECT id FROM x LIMIT n?"

Thanks in advance! Joe

Answer 1

These easiest way would be to use a not operator, so for example:

?q=dog|-dog

would return all documents that contained 'dog' and also did not contain 'dog'. You would need to intercept the special case, as you are already, and just substitute a query/not query combo and you should get everything back.

Answer 2

See the Search API. ?q=matchall&q.parser=structured will match all the documents.

Answer 3

For someone looking for an answer using boto3.

CLOUD_SEARCH_CLIENT = boto3.client(
    'cloudsearchdomain',
    aws_access_key_id='',
    aws_secret_access_key='',
    region_name='',
    endpoint_url="https://search-your-endpoint-url.amazonaws.com"
)

response = CLOUD_SEARCH_CLIENT.search(
    query="matchall",
    queryParser='structured'
)

print(response)