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Upgrade to Azure Search .NET SDK version 9

  • Article

If you're using version 7.0-preview or older of the Azure Search .NET SDK, this article will help you upgrade your application to use version 9.

Note

If you wish to use version 8.0-preview to evaluate features that are not generally available yet, you can also follow the instructions in this article to upgrade to 8.0-preview from prior versions.

For a more general walkthrough of the SDK including examples, see How to use Azure Search from a .NET Application.

Version 9 of the Azure Search .NET SDK contains many changes from earlier versions. Some of these are breaking changes, but they should only require relatively minor changes to your code. See Steps to upgrade for instructions on how to change your code to use the new SDK version.

Note

If you're using version 4.0-preview or older, you should upgrade to version 5 first, and then upgrade to version 9. See Upgrading to the Azure Search .NET SDK version 5 for instructions.

Your Azure Search service instance supports several REST API versions, including the latest one. You can continue to use a version when it is no longer the latest one, but we recommend that you migrate your code to use the newest version. When using the REST API, you must specify the API version in every request via the api-version parameter. When using the .NET SDK, the version of the SDK you're using determines the corresponding version of the REST API. If you are using an older SDK, you can continue to run that code with no changes even if the service is upgraded to support a newer API version.

What's new in version 9

Version 9 of the Azure Search .NET SDK targets 2019-05-06 version of Azure Search REST API, with the following features:

  • AI enrichment is the ability to extract text from images, blobs, and other unstructured data sources - enriching the content to make it more searchable in an Azure Search index.
  • Support for complex types allows you to model almost any nested JSON structure in an Azure Search index.
  • Autocomplete provides an alternative to the Suggest API for implementing search-as-you-type behavior. Autocomplete "finishes" the word or phrase that a user is currently typing.
  • JsonLines parsing mode, part of blob indexing, creates one search document per JSON entity that is separated by a newline.

New preview features in version 8.0-preview

Version 8.0-preview of the Azure Search .NET SDK targets API version 2017-11-11-Preview. This version includes all the same features of version 9, plus:

  • Customer-managed encryption keys for service-side encryption-at-rest is a new preview feature. In addition to the built-in encryption-at-rest managed by Microsoft, you can apply an additional layer of encryption where you are the sole owner of the keys.

Steps to upgrade

First, update your NuGet reference for Microsoft.Azure.Search using either the NuGet Package Manager Console or by right-clicking on your project references and selecting "Manage NuGet Packages..." in Visual Studio.

Once NuGet has downloaded the new packages and their dependencies, rebuild your project. Depending on how your code is structured, it may rebuild successfully. If so, you're ready to go!

If your build fails, you will need to fix each build error. See Breaking changes in version 9 for details on how to resolve each potential build error.

You may see additional build warnings related to obsolete methods or properties. The warnings will include instructions on what to use instead of the deprecated feature. For example, if your application uses the DataSourceType.DocumentDb property, you should get a warning that says "This member is deprecated. Use CosmosDb instead".

Once you've fixed any build errors or warnings, you can make changes to your application to take advantage of new functionality if you wish. New features in the SDK are detailed in What's new in version 9.

Breaking changes in version 9

There are several breaking changes in version 9 that may require code changes in addition to rebuilding your application.

Note

The list of changes below is not exhaustive. Some changes will likely not result in build errors, but are technically breaking since they break binary compatibility with assemblies that depend on earlier versions of the Azure Search .NET SDK assemblies. Such changes are not listed below. Please rebuild your application when upgrading to version 9 to avoid any binary compatibility issues.

Immutable properties

The public properties of several model classes are now immutable. If you need to create custom instances of these classes for testing, you can use the new parameterized constructors:

  • AutocompleteItem
  • DocumentSearchResult
  • DocumentSuggestResult
  • FacetResult
  • SearchResult
  • SuggestResult

Changes to Field

The Field class has changed now that it can also represent complex fields.

The following bool properties are now nullable:

  • IsFilterable
  • IsFacetable
  • IsSearchable
  • IsSortable
  • IsRetrievable
  • IsKey

This is because these properties must now be null in the case of complex fields. If you have code that reads these properties, it has to be prepared to handle null. Note that all other properties of Field have always been and continue to be nullable, and some of those will also be null in the case of complex fields -- specifically the following:

  • Analyzer
  • SearchAnalyzer
  • IndexAnalyzer
  • SynonymMaps

The parameterless constructor of Field has been made internal. From now on, every Field requires an explicit name and data type at the time of construction.

Simplified batch and results types

In version 7.0-preview and earlier, the various classes that encapsulate groups of documents were structured into parallel class hierarchies:

  • DocumentSearchResult and DocumentSearchResult<T> inherited from DocumentSearchResultBase
  • DocumentSuggestResult and DocumentSuggestResult<T> inherited from DocumentSuggestResultBase
  • IndexAction and IndexAction<T> inherited from IndexActionBase
  • IndexBatch and IndexBatch<T> inherited from IndexBatchBase
  • SearchResult and SearchResult<T> inherited from SearchResultBase
  • SuggestResult and SuggestResult<T> inherited from SuggestResultBase

The derived types without a generic type parameter were meant to be used in "dynamically-typed" scenarios and assumed usage of the Document type.

Starting with version 8.0-preview, the base classes and non-generic derived classes have all been removed. For dynamically-typed scenarios, you can use IndexBatch<Document>, DocumentSearchResult<Document>, and so on.

Removed ExtensibleEnum

The ExtensibleEnum base class has been removed. All classes that derived from it are now structs, such as AnalyzerName, DataType, and DataSourceType for example. Their Create methods have also been removed. You can just remove calls to Create since these types are implicitly convertible from strings. If that results in compiler errors, you can explicitly invoke the conversion operator via casting to disambiguate types. For example, you can change code like this:

var index = new Index()
{
    Fields = new[]
    {
        new Field("id", DataType.String) { IsKey = true },
        new Field("message", AnalyzerName.Create("my_email_analyzer")) { IsSearchable = true }
    },
    ...
}

to this:

var index = new Index()
{
    Fields = new[]
    {
        new Field("id", DataType.String) { IsKey = true },
        new Field("message", (AnalyzerName)"my_email_analyzer") { IsSearchable = true }
    },
    ...
}

Properties that held optional values of these types are now explicitly typed as nullable so they continue to be optional.

Removed FacetResults and HitHighlights

The FacetResults and HitHighlights classes have been removed. Facet results are now typed as IDictionary<string, IList<FacetResult>> and hit highlights as IDictionary<string, IList<string>>. A quick way to resolve build errors introduced by this change is to add using aliases at the top of each file that uses the removed types. For example:

using FacetResults = System.Collections.Generic.IDictionary<string, System.Collections.Generic.IList<Models.FacetResult>>;
using HitHighlights = System.Collections.Generic.IDictionary<string, System.Collections.Generic.IList<string>>;

Change to SynonymMap

The SynonymMap constructor no longer has an enum parameter for SynonymMapFormat. This enum only had one value, and was therefore redundant. If you see build errors as a result of this, simply remove references to the SynonymMapFormat parameter.

Miscellaneous model class changes

The AutocompleteMode property of AutocompleteParameters is no longer nullable. If you have code that assigns this property to null, you can simply remove it and the property will automatically be initialized to the default value.

The order of the parameters to the IndexAction constructor has changed now that this constructor is auto-generated. Instead of using the constructor, we recommend using the factory methods IndexAction.Upload, IndexAction.Merge, and so on.

Removed preview features

If you are upgrading from version 8.0-preview to version 9, be aware that encryption with customer-managed keys has been removed since this feature is still in preview. Specifically, the EncryptionKey properties of Index and SynonymMap have been removed.

If your application has a hard dependency on this feature, you will not be able to upgrade to version 9 of the Azure Search .NET SDK. You can continue to use version 8.0-preview. However, please keep in mind that we do not recommend using preview SDKs in production applications. Preview features are for evaluation only and may change.

Note

If you created encrypted indexes or synonym maps using version 8.0-preview of the SDK, you will still be able use them and modify their definitions using version 9 of the SDK without adversely affecting their encryption status. Version 9 of the SDK will not send the encryptionKey property to the REST API, and as a result the REST API will not change the encryption status of the resource.

Behavioral change in data retrieval

If you're using the "dynamically typed" Search, Suggest, or Get APIs that return instances of type Document, be aware that they now deserialize empty JSON arrays to object[] instead of string[].

Conclusion

If you need more details on using the Azure Search .NET SDK, see the .NET How-to.

We welcome your feedback on the SDK. If you encounter problems, feel free to ask us for help on Stack Overflow. If you find a bug, you can file an issue in the Azure .NET SDK GitHub repository. Make sure to prefix your issue title with "[Azure Search]".

Thank you for using Azure Search!