Need Elasticsearch guidance for searching on an array of chemical compounds - elasticsearch

Question

I have a list of products and array of chemical compounds for each product, i.e. ['Sodium', 'Sodium bicarbonate', .....]. In this example 'sodium', and 'sodium bicarbonate' are two different values that can be search on independently, which complicates things, so using the text keyword field criteria did not help.
I need some guidance on the best method to handle these array of strings within Elasticsearch while retaining Elasticsearch's indexing magic. I appreciate any help you can provide.
FYI
I'm currently using Elasticsearch 6.3

Answer 1

You can use the multi-match query, which builds on the match query to allow multi-field queries
Adding a working example with index data, search query, and search result.
Index Data:
{
"product": "product1",
"compounds": [
"Sodium",
"Sodium bicarbonate"
]
}
{
"product": "product2",
"compounds": [
"Sodium"
]
}
{
"product": "product3",
"compounds": [
"Sodium bicarbonate"
]
}
{
"product": "product4",
"compounds": [
"Chlorine
]
}
Search Query:
{
"query": {
"multi_match" : {
"query": "Sodium AND Sodium bicarbonate",
"fields": [ "compounds", "compounds.keyword" ]
}
}
}
Search Result:
"hits": [
{
"_index": "65513968",
"_type": "_doc",
"_id": "1",
"_score": 1.0897084,
"_source": {
"product": "product1",
"compounds": [
"Sodium",
"Sodium bicarbonate"
]
}
},
{
"_index": "65513968",
"_type": "_doc",
"_id": "3",
"_score": 1.0659102,
"_source": {
"product": "product3",
"compounds": [
"Sodium bicarbonate"
]
}
},
{
"_index": "65513968",
"_type": "_doc",
"_id": "2",
"_score": 0.7032229,
"_source": {
"product": "product",
"compounds": [
"Sodium"
]
}
}
]
You can use terms query if you want to return documents that contain one or more exact terms in a field
A unique list of chemical compounds
To find the unique lists of chemical compounds you can use the terms aggregation.
{
"size": 0,
"aggs": {
"compounds": {
"terms": {
"field": "compounds.keyword"
}
}
}
}
Result:
"aggregations": {
"compounds": {
"doc_count_error_upper_bound": 0,
"sum_other_doc_count": 0,
"buckets": [
{
"key": "Sodium",
"doc_count": 2
},
{
"key": "Sodium bicarbonate",
"doc_count": 2
},
{
"key": "Chlorine",
"doc_count": 1
}
]
}
}