Elasticsearch: "must" query on nested fields

Question

How to do a "must" "match" query on multiple fields under the same nesting? Here's a reproducible ES index where the "user" field is defined as "nested" type.

PUT my_index
{
    "mappings": {
        "properties": {
            "user": {
                "type": "nested",
                "properties": {
                    "firstname": {"type": "text"}
                }
            }
        }
    }
}

And here are 2 documents:

PUT my_index/_doc/1
{
  "user" : [ 
    {
      "firstname" : "John"
    },
    {
      "firstname" : "Alice"
    }
  ]
}

PUT my_index/_doc/2
{
  "user" : [ 
    {
      "firstname" : "Alice"
    }
  ]
}

For this index, how can I query for documents where "John" AND "Alice" both exist? With the index defined above, I expect to get Document 1 but not Document 2. So far, I've tried the following code, but it's returning no hits:

GET my_index/_search 
{
    "query": {
        "nested": {
            "path": "user",
            "query": {
                "bool": {
                    "must": [
                        {"match": {"user.firstname": "John"}},
                        {"match": {"user.firstname": "Alice"}}
                    ]
                }
            }
        }
    }
}

What version of elasticsearch do you use?

ozlevka
– ozlevka

2019-10-18 17:16:51 +00:00
Commented Oct 18, 2019 at 17:16 — ozlevka
– ozlevka, Commented Oct 18, 2019 at 17:16
I'm using Elasticsearch version 7.4.0

John Jung
– John Jung

2019-10-18 18:12:13 +00:00
Commented Oct 18, 2019 at 18:12 — John Jung
– John Jung, Commented Oct 18, 2019 at 18:12

Kamal Kunjapur · Accepted Answer · 2019-10-18 17:23:35Z

5

Below query is what is required.

POST my_index/_search
{
  "query": {
    "bool": {
      "must": [
        {
          "nested": {
            "path": "user",
            "query": {
              "match": {
                "user.firstname": "alice"
              }
            }
          }
        },
        {
          "nested": {
            "path": "user",
            "query": {
              "match": {
                "user.firstname": "john"
              }
            }
          }
        }
      ]
    }
  }
}

Notice how I've made use of two nested queries in a single must clause. That is because if you notice the documents that you have alice and john are both considered two different documents.

The query you have would work if your document structure is something like below:

POST my_index/_doc/3
{
  "user" : [    
    {
      "firstname" : ["Alice", "John"]
    }
  ]
}

Try reading this (nested datatype) and this (nested query) link to understand more on how they work and from the second link, you can see the below info:

The nested query searches nested field objects as if they were indexed as separate documents.

Hope that helps!

edited Oct 18, 2019 at 17:23

answered Oct 18, 2019 at 17:16

Kamal Kunjapur

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1 Comment

simply good Over a year ago

With this approach this is impossible to use inner_hits and this is still not possible to make it work this way. If you want to know inner hits I would recommend doing it programmatically: 1) when building query for each nested sub query write inner_hits: { <provide_name>i }, where i - is a count number of subquery. 2) when you receive results merge inner_hits by <provide_name>[i]

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