Preparing Your Data for Amazon CloudSearch

Before you can submit data to Amazon CloudSearch for indexing, you must describe it according to the Search Data Format (SDF). In SDF, each item that you want to be able to receive as a search result is represented as a document. Every document has a unique id (docid), a version number, and one or more fields that contain the data that you want to search and return in results. These document fields are used to populate the index fields you configure for your domain. For more information, see Configuring Index Fields for an Amazon CloudSearch Domain.

The Mapping Document Data section discusses how your source data relates to your domain's indexing options. Creating SDF Batches describes how to format your data in SDF.

For a detailed description of the SDF JSON and XML schemas, see the Amazon CloudSearch Document Service API Reference.