`blobMode: "bytes"` left blobs inside structs as descriptors because projection matching ignored parent structs and byte replacement only rebuilt top-level fields. Expand direct struct projections and aliases to their blob leaves, then recursively replace the corresponding Arrow fields and data with `LargeBinary`. Track literal output names separately from descendant paths so scalar aliases stay intact and every overlapping blob projection is converted. Preserve null structs, null and empty blobs, sibling fields, schema metadata, and the existing row ID and snapshot behavior. Blobs inside lists retain their descriptors. Update the API docs to describe struct support. Regression coverage includes full and parent-struct projections, leaf and struct aliases, dotted output names, overlapping projections in both orders, nested structs, nulls, empty blobs and results, multiple batches, list siblings, query reuse, row IDs, and concurrent writes. Regression tests reproduce the nested-blob and projection-collision failures before the corresponding changes. Validation: - `pnpm build` - `pnpm lint` - `pnpm run docs` - `pnpm test __test__/nested_blob.test.ts __test__/blob.test.ts __test__/query.test.ts --runInBand --verbose=false` — 142 passed - `pnpm test __test__/table.test.ts --runInBand --verbose=false -t 'when dealing with blob columns'` — 60 passed Fixes #4609 <!-- lance-gatekeeper-fix:v1 agent=76edaac77d044c468d569b58efa2104a generation=1 --> --------- Co-authored-by: Gatefixer <313497061+lancedb-gatefixer[bot]@users.noreply.github.com> Co-authored-by: Xuanwo <github@xuanwo.io>
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
Run these commands from the LanceDB repository root. The subshell changes into
docs to load mkdocs.yml, while leaving your shell in the repository root.
(cd docs && PYTHONPATH=. mkdocs serve)
If you want to just generate the HTML files:
(cd docs && PYTHONPATH=. mkdocs build)
If successful, you should see a docs/site directory in the repository root 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