Aliases use-case

[Thaigun]

Hi again! I hope I don't annoy you with all the issues and that you find the use cases from the field useful.

Typesense docs mention this alias use-case: https://typesense.org/docs/28.0/api/collection-alias.html#use-case

That's what I had done, too. My idea was that I'd have a workflow to re-index everything into a new collection when needed, point the alias to the new collection and remove the old collection. I used to call the collections with names like tenants-${Date.now()} while the alias would be tenants. Clients would search from the alias as if it was a collection.

Now, the issue. Creating an alias is not allowed for collection names that have not been defined beforehand. That also makes re-indexing use-case a bit hairy. I.e. the following is not allowed:

    await alias({
        name: 'tenants',
        collection_name: 'tenants-' + Date.now(),
    }).upsert();

I don't know, maybe we could allow overriding collection names when indexing data and alias could be more relaxed with the collection name and take the collection schema as a parameter to know what type will be returned?

[tharropoulos]

I think aliases are going to need a refactor. I'll have to think about how I'll implement it to make the alias feature more usable in general. It may end up deviating from Typesense's API contract as well.