Creating custom document attributes

When the source of your data is an S3 bucket, you can apply custom attributes to your documents. For example, you could create a custom attribute called "Department" with values "HR", "Sales", and "Manufacturing". You can apply these attributes to your documents so that you can limit the response to documents in the "HR" department, for example.

For other data sources, you use field mapping for the same purpose. For more information, see Mapping data source fields.

Amazon Kendra has six reserved attributes that you can use. The attributes are:

After you have created a custom attribute, you can use the attribute when you call the Query operation. You can use it for faceted search, use it to filter the response, and choose whether the attribute should be returned in the response. For more information, see Filtering queries.

Adding custom attributes with the BatchPutDocument operation

When you use the BatchPutDocument operation to add a document to your index, you specify custom attributes as part of the Attributes structure. You can add multiple attributes when you call the operation. The following example is a Attributes structure that adds "Department" and "_category" attributes to a document.

"Attributes": 
    {
        "Department": "HR",
        "_category": "Vacation policy"
    }

Adding custom attributes to an Amazon S3 data source

When you use an Amazon S3 bucket as a data source for your index, you add metadata to the documents with companion metadata files. You place the metadata JSON files in a directory structure that is parallel to your documents. For more information, see S3 document metadata.

You specify custom attributes in the Attributes JSON structure. You can add a list of attributes. For example, the following example is an Attributes structure that defines three custom attributes and one reserved attribute.

"Attributes": {
        "brand": "Amazon Basics",
        "price": 1595,
        "_category": "sports",
        "subcategories": ["outdoors", "electronics"]
    }