Glossary
Every Sinequa term used in this documentation, defined once, with a link to where it matters.
Words that come from the Sinequa platform rather than from this library. If a page uses one without explaining
it, it is defined here.
| Term | What it is | Where it matters |
|---|
| Index | The searchable store: documents kept as rows with typed columns. Filtering and sorting always name a column. | Filtering |
| Column | One typed field of the index — title, modified, docformat, or an administrator-mapped slot like sourcestr1. Distinct from the label an interface displays for it. | Server configuration |
| Connector | What crawls a source into the index. Determines which metadata exists in a given deployment. | — |
| Web application (app) | A named server-side configuration for one front end: which web services, facets, tabs and sort options exist. Its name is the app you pass to the client. | Configuration |
| Web service | One configured operation — query, preview, autocomplete, labels, dataset, export, sponsored links. Calls always name the one they run. | Endpoints |
| Query web service | The search configuration, conventionally named _query. It is what a query's name identifies — not the query itself. | Query anatomy |
| Principal | The authenticated identity: user, groups, administrative flags. | The current user |
| Access list | Per-document rights captured at crawl time. Security is applied in the index, so results are already filtered by what the user may see. | The current user |
| Term | What it is | Where it matters |
|---|
| Aggregation (facet) | Document counts per value of a column, computed over the result set and returned with the search response. | Aggregations |
| Distribution | An aggregation whose items are ranges — dates, sizes. An item's value is an expression the server composed, not a value, so filtering on it needs a dedicated helper. | Filtering |
| Tree aggregation | An aggregation over a hierarchical column such as treepath, expanded a level at a time. | Aggregations |
| Tab | A distribution presented as top-level navigation ("All", "Documents", "People"), each with its own count. | Tabs, scopes and sorting |
| Scope | A server-defined restriction added to the query — a subset of the corpus the user can switch between. | Tabs, scopes and sorting |
| Treepath | A path-shaped column (/HR/Contracts/2024/) used for folder-like navigation. | Aggregations |
| Relevance | The engine's ranking. hasRelevance on a result says whether the query had text to rank by, which decides the default sort. | Text and paging |
| Neural search | Vector-based retrieval and ranking on top of keyword search. Produces answers and passages. | Language features |
| Answer | A short extracted span the engine believes answers the question, with its own score and source document. | Language features |
| Passage | A relevant span of a document, returned either per-document or across the corpus (top passages). | Language features |
| Did you mean | The spelling correction: what was typed, what it was corrected to, and which of the two was actually run. | Language features |
| Query intent | A server-side rule that recognises a pattern in the query ("flights to Paris") and attaches structured data or an action to it. | Language features |
| RFM | Relevance Feedback Model — relevance learned from user behaviour: clicks, likes, explicit importance. | Audit |
| Dataset | A named, parameterised query configured on the server. Used for dashboards and analytics rather than document search. | Datasets |
| Sponsored link | An editorially promoted link returned outside the engine's ranking. | Sponsored links |
| Basket | A saved set of documents; a query can be restricted to it. | User settings |
| Label | A user-applied tag on documents, public or private, with its own rights. | Labels |
| Term | What it is | Where it matters |
|---|
| Record / Article | One document in the results. Article is its type; it declares the standard columns only. | Result anatomy |
| Preview | A cached, highlightable rendition of a document, with entity and term highlights addressable by category and by position. | Preview |
| Text chunk | An extracted span of a document's text, addressed by offset — the building block for retrieval-augmented generation. | Text chunks |
| Relevant extract | A short highlighted snippet of the document, produced with the results for display in a hit list. | Result anatomy |
| Container | A collection of user-uploaded documents, with owners and readers, indexed by the platform. | Document upload |
| Syslang | Sinequa's inline multilingual format: all[fr]tous[de]alle. Appears in facet labels, tab names and column labels. Decode it with sysLang before displaying. | Localization |
| Term | What it is | Where it matters |
|---|
| Web token | The JWT the server issues on sign-in, delivered in an HTTP-only cookie. JavaScript never reads it. | How it works |
| CSRF token | The companion token returned alongside the cookie, stored by the library and sent as a header on every request. Any response may refresh it. | How it works |
| Pre-login | The unauthenticated configuration response that announces how this server expects you to authenticate. | Auto-detection |
| Auth mode | Which method is in force: credentials, sso, oauth, saml, bearer, or unknown before it is resolved. | Choosing a mode |
| Ambient SSO | Authentication performed by the transport itself — Windows integrated auth, a reverse proxy — rather than by a form. | SSO |
| Auto-authentication | The server-side challenge that establishes a session when a protected endpoint is hit without suppressing it. Disabling it per request is the noAutoAuthentication flag. | SSO |
| Impersonation (user override) | An administrator running requests as another user, carried by dedicated headers. | Impersonation |
| Access token | A server-configured token authorising a fixed set of API methods, used for server-to-server access. | Bearer token |
| Convention | Meaning |
|---|
$-prefixed field | Added by the client, never sent by the server: $error on a result, $selected on a facet item, $hasMore on an aggregation, $path and $level on a tree node. |
CC prefix | A server configuration type — CCApp, CCQuery, CCColumn. What the administrator decided, as your code reads it. |
| Free function | The module-level form of a call — fetchQuery(query) — running on a default client. The equivalent method on an explicit client is client.api.query.search(query). |
partial code block | A fragment in this documentation, shown to illustrate one point. Every unmarked block is a complete file. |