Elasticsearch: The Definitive Guide

Chapter 41. Nested Objects

Given the fact that creating, deleting, and updating a single document in Elasticsearch is atomic, it makes sense to store closely related entities within the same document. For instance, we could store an order and all of its order lines in one document, or we could store a blog post and all of its comments together, by passing an array of comments:

PUT /my_index/blogpost/1
{
  "title": "Nest eggs",
  "body":  "Making your money work...",
  "tags":  [ "cash", "shares" ],
  "comments": [ 
    {
      "name":    "John Smith",
      "comment": "Great article",
      "age":     28,
      "stars":   4,
      "date":    "2014-09-01"
    },
    {
      "name":    "Alice White",
      "comment": "More like this please",
      "age":     31,
      "stars":   5,
      "date":    "2014-10-22"
    }
  ]
}

If we rely on dynamic mapping, the comments field will be autocreated as an object field.

Because all of the content is in the same document, there is no need to join blog posts and comments at query time, so searches perform well.

The problem is that the preceding document would match a query like this:

GET /_search
{
  "query": {
    "bool": {
      "must": [
        { "match": { "name": "Alice" }},
        { "match": { "age":  28      }} 
      ]
    }
  }
}

Alice is 31, not 28!

The reason for this cross-object ...