spring-projects/spring-ai · error · IllegalStateException

Failed to delete documents by filter

Error message

Failed to delete documents by filter

What it means

doDelete(Filter.Expression) fetches candidate IDs via a GraphQL query, deserializes response JSON with JsonMapper, then deletes. A JacksonException during parsing is rethrown as IllegalStateException('Failed to delete documents by filter'). The response body did not match the expected JSON structure.

Source

Thrown at vector-stores/spring-ai-weaviate-store/src/main/java/org/springframework/ai/vectorstore/weaviate/WeaviateVectorStore.java:324

			List<Document> matchingDocs = similaritySearch(searchRequest);

			if (!matchingDocs.isEmpty()) {
				List<String> idsToDelete = matchingDocs.stream().map(Document::getId).toList();

				delete(idsToDelete);

				if (logger.isDebugEnabled()) {
					logger.debug("Deleted " + idsToDelete.size() + " documents matching filter expression");
				}
			}
			else {
				logger.debug("No documents found matching filter expression");
			}
		}
		catch (JacksonException e) {
			logger.error("Failed to delete documents by filter", e);
			throw new IllegalStateException("Failed to delete documents by filter", e);
		}
	}

	@Override
	public List<Document> doSimilaritySearch(SearchRequest request) {

		float[] embedding = this.embeddingModel.embed(request.getQuery());

		GetBuilder.GetBuilderBuilder builder = GetBuilder.builder();

		GetBuilderBuilder queryBuilder = builder.className(this.options.getObjectClass())
			.withNearVectorFilter(NearVectorArgument.builder()
				.vector(EmbeddingUtils.toFloatArray(embedding))
				.certainty((float) request.getSimilarityThreshold())
				.build())
			.limit(request.getTopK())
			.withWhereFilter(WhereArgument.builder().build()) // adds an empty 'where:{}'
			// placeholder.

View on GitHub (pinned to 98a7beda4f)

Solutions

1. Check server/client version compatibility: align Weaviate server version with the version supported by your spring-ai-weaviate-store release.
2. Look at the logged stack trace (logger.error already logs it) to see the exact Jackson path that failed.
3. Capture the raw GraphQL response with curl to compare its shape against the parser's expectations.
4. If a proxy is in front of Weaviate, bypass it or fix it to return JSON for GraphQL endpoints.

try { vectorStore.delete(filterExpr); } catch (IllegalStateException e) { log.error("Filter-based delete failed to parse Weaviate response", e); /* check server/client version alignment */ }

When it happens

Trigger: VectorStore.delete(Filter.Expression) when the GraphQL _additional id response cannot be parsed — unexpected response shape, Weaviate version returning a different field layout, or truncated/corrupt response.

Common situations: Upgrading Weaviate server to a version with changed GraphQL response format while using an older spring-ai-weaviate-store; proxy/gateway returning an HTML error page; empty data maps being interpreted incorrectly.

Related errors

• Invalid JSON format for the response:
• Cannot deserialize ThinkOption from token:
• Conversion from JSON to %s failed
• Failed to serialize the Document metadata:
• Failed to delete documents because:

AI-assisted analysis of spring-projects/spring-ai@98a7beda4f (2026-09-11). Data as JSON: /api/errors/2d004342af8820a9. Report an issue: GitHub.