Views in AQL

Conceptually a view is just another document data source, similar to an array or a document/edge collection, e.g.:

FOR doc IN exampleView SEARCH ...
  FILTER ...
  SORT ...
  RETURN ...

Other than collections, views have an additional but optional SEARCH keyword:

FOR doc IN exampleView
  SEARCH ...
  FILTER ...
  SORT ...
  RETURN ...

A view is meant to be an abstraction over a transformation applied to documents of zero or more collections. The transformation is view-implementation specific and may even be as simple as an identity transformation thus making the view represent all documents available in the specified set of collections.

Views can be defined and administered on a per view-type basis via the web interface.

Currently there is a single supported view implementation, namely arangosearch as described in ArangoSearch View.

Also see the detailed ArangoSearch tutorial to learn more.