Resources

When a visitor finds a film, you want to show its poster and link to its detail page. That data needs to come back with each result — but nobody searches for a film by its image URL. A resource field is exactly for this: data that rides along, but isn't searched or filtered.

What a resource is

A resource is a value carried with each result purely so your app can use it — a poster URL, a deep link, a price, an external ID. It's returned in every search response, but Search Stack doesn't index it, so it never bloats your search or slows it down. Think of it as the payload stapled to a result, not part of what makes the result findable.

The three field types, side by side:

Add a poster field

On the movies list, choose Fields then Add Resource Field, and name it poster_url.

Edit each film and paste in its poster address. The list now carries the poster alongside everything else:

It comes back with every result

Search as normal — the poster is right there in the response, ready for your app to drop into an <img> tag:

GET https://api.searchstack.dev/search/Demo/movies/1?query=matrix
X-API-Key: {your key}

{
  "results": [
    {
      "name": "The Matrix",
      "fields": {
        "genre": "Sci-Fi",
        "year": 1999,
        "poster_url": "https://image.tmdb.org/t/p/w500/f89U3ADr1oiB1s9GkdPOEpXUk5H.jpg"
      }
    }
  ],
  "count": 1,
  "total_count": 1
}

A good rule of thumb: if a visitor might type it, make it searchable; if they might click it to narrow results, make it a facet; if it's just data your app needs to display, make it a resource. Keeping display-only data out of the search index is what keeps search fast.

You've now shaped a rich movies list one field at a time. Next we'll fill it properly — loading a whole catalogue in one go instead of typing films in by hand.