Searching term in subdocuments with elasticsearch

Question

I have a index document structure like below;

{
   "term":"some term",
   "inlang":"some lang"
   "translations" : {
      {
          "translation":"some translation",
          "outlang":"some lang",
          "translations" : {
              {
                  "translation":"some translation 1"
                  "outlang": "some lang 1"
                  "translations" : {...}
              }
          }
      },
      ...
   } 
}

I want to find a translation in such documents. However, this translation can exists at any level of this document. Is it possible to search term dynamically by using elasticsearch?

For example,

{
   "query": {
      "*.translation":"searchterm"
   }
}

Thanks in advance

Answer 1

I have managed to do that with following query;

{
  "query": {
    "query_string": {
      "query": "someterm",
      "fields": ["*.translation"]
    }
  }
}

or

{
  "query": {
    "multi_match": {
      "query": "someterm",
      "fields": ["*.translation"]
    }
  }
}

You can see elasticsearch google group conversation here

Answer 2

No, I do not believe this functionality is built into ElasticSearch at the moment. This answer suggests you could build the functionality with a script, but it would be super slow.

In general, ES doesn't play nicely with nested data. It supports nested fields, but many of the more advanced search functionality isn't capable of operating on complex nested data. My suggestion is to denormalize your data so that every translation is represented by a single item in the index, and link between them with ID numbers.