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Define Stored Source Fields in Your Atlas Search Index

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  • Syntax
  • Options
  • Boolean Values
  • Object
  • Examples

The storedSource option in an Atlas Search index definition specifies the fields in the source document that Atlas Search must store. You can configure storedSource to improve query performance in certain use cases, as it reduces the need for implicit query time lookup on the backend database. You can store fields of all Data Types on Atlas Search.

Atlas Search doesn't index stored fields, so you must index the fields separately in order to run queries on them. You can also retrieve stored fields at query time by using the returnStoredSource option.

Note

storedSource is only available on Atlas clusters running one of the following versions:

  • MongoDB 5.0.6+

  • MongoDB 6.0+

  • MongoDB 7.0+

To learn more about retrieving the stored fields, see Return Stored Source Fields.

The storedSource option has the following syntax in an index definition:

{
...,
"storedSource": true | false | {
"include" | "exclude": [
"<field-name>",
...
]
}
}

The storedSource option takes a boolean value or an object in the index definition.

Value
Description
true
Specifies that Atlas Search must store all the fields in the documents. Storing full documents might significantly impact performance during indexing and querying. To learn more, see Storing Source Fields.
false
Specifies that Atlas Search must not store the original source document. This is the default value for the storedSource option.

The storedSource option object accepts one of the following fields:

Note

The object must contain either include or exclude.

Field
Type
Description
include
array of strings
List that contains the field names or dot-separated paths to fields to store. In addition to the specified fields, Atlas Search stores _id also by default.
exclude
array of strings
List that contains the field names or dot-separated paths to fields to exclude from being stored. If specified, Atlas Search stores original documents except the fields listed here.

The following index examples use the fields in the sample_mflix.movies collection to demonstrate how to configure the fields to store on Atlas Search using the storedSource option. You can use the Visual Editor or the JSON Editor in the Atlas UI to configure the indexes.

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