Files
lancedb/docs
Will Jones d889321b5e fix!: combine repeated where filters with AND instead of replacing (#3585)
BREAKING CHANGE: When passing multiple where clauses to a query, they
now stack instead of replacing the previous filter.

Previously, calling `where`/`only_if` more than once on a query silently
replaced the previous filter, so only the last filter was applied. This
was
surprising and could return rows that an earlier filter should have
excluded.

This implements the alternative suggested in
https://github.com/lancedb/lancedb/pull/3514#issuecomment-4664901580:
instead of
rejecting a second filter, repeated filters are combined with a logical
AND
(`(previous) AND (new)`).

The combination happens in the Rust core (`QueryBase::only_if` and
`only_if_expr`), so it applies to all SDKs at once (Rust, Python async,
and
TypeScript). The Python sync query builder keeps its own filter state,
so it
combines filters in the binding layer as well.

SQL string and expression filters are combined within their own
representation.
When the two representations are mixed, the expression is lowered to SQL
(via
`expr_to_sql_string`) and the filters are combined as SQL strings, so
chaining
`where` works regardless of which form each filter takes.

Fixes #2649

## Tests
- Rust: `cargo test --features remote -p lancedb --lib query`
- Python: `uv run --extra tests pytest python/tests/test_query.py`
- TypeScript: `pnpm test __test__/query.test.ts`

🤖 Generated with [Claude Code](https://claude.com/claude-code)

Co-authored-by: Claude Opus 4.8 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
2026-07-01 10:11:58 -07:00
..

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

  1. Install LanceDB Python. See setup in Python contributing guide. Run make develop to install the Python package.
  2. 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 @lancedb/lancedb package must be built before running the tests:

pushd nodejs
npm ci
npm run build
popd

Then you can run the examples by going to the nodejs/examples directory and running the tests like a normal npm package:

pushd nodejs/examples
npm ci
npm 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
npm run docs
popd