Deleting Documents

Endpoint Address

Vectara exposes a REST endpoint at the following URL to delete content from a corpus:

https://api.vectara.io/v1/delete-doc

This page describes the details of interacting with this endpoint.

A request to delete a document from a corpus consists of three key pieces of information: the customer ID, the corpus ID, and the document ID.

message DeleteDocumentRequest {
  int64 customer_id = 1;
  int64 corpus_id = 2;
  string document_id = 3;
}

The reply from the server consists of nothing yet. Note that the operation is not synchronous: the document may still be returned in query results. The platform typically takes 5-10 mins before the document is removed from serving.

The server returns gRPC status codes. For example:

• INTERNAL: An internal error code indicates a failure inside the platform, and an immediate retry may not succeed.
• UNAVAILABLE: The service is temporarily unavailable, and the operation should be retried, preferably with a backoff. Note that the deletion operation is idempotent, so it is fine to re-apply.

Example

The code snippet below illustrates how to delete a document from a corpus. For information on how to get the call credentials and metadata, please consult The OAuth 2.0 documentation.

Java

# Create the document deletion request.
request = common_pb2.DeleteDocumentRequest()
request.customer_id = customer_id
request.corpus_id = _CORPUS_ID
request.document_id = "en.wikipedia.org/wiki/California"

# Create the gRPC stub.
stub = services_pb2_grpc.IndexServiceStub(
  grpc.secure_channel("indexing.vectara.io:443", grpc.ssl_channel_credentials()))

# Send the request to the server.
response = stub.Delete(request,
                       credentials=call_credentials,
                       metadata=[('customer-id-bin', packed_customer_id)])

Python

indexingStub.withCallCredentials(credentials(tokenSupplier.get().getOrDie()))
    .withDeadlineAfter(30, TimeUnit.SECONDS)    // Always set a deadline.
    .delete(
        DeleteDocumentRequest
            .newBuilder()
            .setCustomerId(customerId)
            .setCorpusId(corpusId)
            .setDocumentId("en.wikipedia.org/wiki/California")
            .build());