mikemikimike
be3215a6ae
## Issue Fixes #4063 ## Background The Node.js SDK currently requires callers to know the Arrow extension metadata needed to represent JSON fields. This makes a common LanceDB schema type unnecessarily verbose and easy to get wrong. ## Changes - Add `makeJsonField(name, nullable = true)` to create a UTF-8 Arrow field with the `arrow.json` extension metadata. - Re-export the helper from the public Node.js entry point. - Add coverage for the default nullable behavior, explicit non-nullable fields, and the extension metadata. - Add the generated TypeDoc function page and public globals entry, including a usage example. ## Implementation The helper uses the existing Apache Arrow `Field` type and sets `ARROW:extension:name` to `arrow.json`, matching the metadata convention already used by LanceDB. ## Compatibility This is an additive Node.js API. Existing schema construction and Arrow behavior are unchanged. ## Verification - `pnpm test -- arrow.test.ts --runInBand` — 236 tests passed. - `pnpm exec biome ci lancedb/arrow.ts lancedb/index.ts __test__/arrow.test.ts` — passed. - `git diff --check` — passed. ## Not run / known limitations - `pnpm build` and `pnpm run docs` were attempted after expanding the checkout. Both are blocked locally by the native binding build/type declarations: Cargo did not complete, and TypeDoc reported the missing generated `nodejs/lancedb/native` module. The docs files were generated from the updated TypeScript comments; full build and docs validation are left to CI.
LanceDB Documentation
LanceDB docs are available at docs.lancedb.com.
The SDK docs are built and deployed automatically by Github Actions
whenever a commit is pushed to the main branch. So it is possible for the docs to show
unreleased features.
Building the docs
Setup
- Install LanceDB Python. See setup in Python contributing guide.
Run
make developto install the Python package. - Install documentation dependencies. From LanceDB repo root:
pip install -r docs/requirements.txt
Preview the docs
cd docs
mkdocs serve
If you want to just generate the HTML files:
PYTHONPATH=. mkdocs build -f docs/mkdocs.yml
If successful, you should see a docs/site directory that you can verify locally.
Adding examples
To make sure examples are correct, we put examples in test files so they can be run as part of our test suites.
You can see the tests are at:
- Python:
python/python/tests/docs - Typescript:
nodejs/examples/
Checking python examples
cd python
pytest -vv python/tests/docs
Checking typescript examples
The examples depend on @lancedb/lancedb at file:../dist, so the package must be
built before running the tests. This uses pnpm; see the
Typescript contributing guide for the toolchain setup.
pushd nodejs
pnpm install
pnpm build
popd
Then you can run the examples by going to the nodejs/examples directory, which is a
separate pnpm package with its own lockfile:
pushd nodejs/examples
pnpm install
pnpm test
popd
API documentation
Python
The Python API documentation is organized based on the file docs/src/python/python.md.
We manually add entries there so we can control the organization of the reference page.
However, this means any new types must be manually added to the file. No additional
steps are needed to generate the API documentation.
Typescript
The typescript API documentation is generated from the typescript source code using typedoc.
When new APIs are added, you must manually re-run the typedoc command to update the API documentation. The new files should be checked into the repository.
pushd nodejs
# `pnpm docs` would invoke pnpm's built-in `docs` command, not the script.
pnpm run docs
popd