render virtual fields with liquid templates

[tacman]

I've started using liquid for the semantic search and thought that there was a way to perhaps leverage it to other parts of the application. So my idea is that you could have virtual fields defined in settings that returned rendered liquid templates.

->updateVirtualFields([
            'fullname' => "{{ doc.first }} {{ doc.last }}"
            'tagsAsStrings' => "{% for t in doc.tags %}{{ t }}{% unless forloop.last %} and{% endunless -%}{% endfor %}"
]);

[dureuill]

hey tacman 👋

that's an interesting idea 🤔

do you think we could add a template search parameter, that when passed, replaces the objects in the hits array in the response with the template, rendered for each hit?

The difference with your idea is that the template could be specified at search time, and entirely replace the document.
Another option would be to keep a "template directory" for each index, and allow passing the name of a template at search time.

What do you think?

[tacman]

those are worth exploring.

Continuing the brainstorming, the templates could have an order and be processed sequentially, e.g.

templates: 
   link: "<a href="/product/show/{{ doc.id }}">{{ doc.title }}</a>"
   button: "<button class="bg-danger">{{ doc.link }}</button"

I'll be working more with this over the next few weeks, I currently render with twig and twigjs, but sometimes I don't want the hassle of integrating it, so this might be helpful. Obviously, it increases the return payload though.