IndexedDB: MultiEntry Explained

For a long time I was not sure what the purpose of the multiEntry attribute was. Since non of the browsers supported it yet, but since sometime Firefox and even the latest builds of Chrome support it, it all came clear to me. The multiEntry attribute enables you to filter on the individual values of an array. For this reason, the multiEntry attribute is only useful when the index is put on a property that contains an array as value.

When the multiEntry attribute is on true, there will be a record added for every value in the array. The key of this record will be the value of the array and the value will be the object keeping the array. Because the values in the array are used as key, means that the values inside the array need to be valid keys. This means they can only be of the following types:

• Array
• DOMString
• float
• Date

So far for the theory, an example will make everything clear.

In the example below I will use an object Blog. A blog contains out of the following properties:

var blog = { Id: 1
            , Title: "Blog post"
            , content: "content"
            , tags: ["html5", "indexeddb", "linq2indexeddb"]};

In the indexeddb we have an object store called blog which has an index on the tags property. The index has the multiEntry attribute turned on. If we would insert the object above, we would see the following records in the index:

So for every value in the array of the tags attribute, a record is added in the index. This means when you start filtering, it is possible that the same object can be added to the result multiple times. For example if you would filter on all tags greater then “i”, the result would be 2 times the blog object I use in this example.