4.2. Field data processing

Fields are named pieces of information in or about documents, like title, author, abstract.

The field values for documents can appear in several ways during indexing: either output by filters as meta fields in the HTML header section, or extracted from file extended attributes, or added as attributes of the Doc object when using the API, or again synthetized internally by Recoll.

The Recoll query language allows searching for text in a specific field.

Recoll defines a number of default fields. Additional ones can be output by filters, and described in the fields configuration file.

Fields can be:

A field can be either or both indexed and stored. This and other aspects of fields handling is defined inside the fields configuration file.

The sequence of events for field processing is as follows:

You can find more information in the section about the fields file, or in comments inside the file.

You can also have a look at the example on the Wiki, detailing how one could add a page count field to pdf documents for displaying inside result lists.