Is it possible to check that specific data matches the query without loading it to the index? - elasticsearch

Question

Imagine that I have a specific data string and a specific query. The simple way to check that the query matches the data is to load the data into the Elastic index and run the online query. But can I do it without putting it into the index?
Maybe there are some open-source libraries that implement the Elastic search functionality offline, so I can call something like getScore(data, query)? Or it's possible to implement by using specific API endpoints?
Thanks in advance!

Answer 1

What you can do is to leverage the percolator type.
What this allows you to do is to store the query instead of the document and then test whether a document would match the stored query.
For instance, you first create an index with a field of type percolator that will contain your query (you also need to add in the mapping any field used by the query so ES knows what their types are):
PUT my_index
{
"mappings": {
"properties": {
"query": {
"type": "percolator"
},
"message": {
"type": "text"
}
}
}
}
Then you can index a real query, like this:
PUT my_index/_doc/match_value
{
"query" : {
"match" : {
"message" : "bonsai tree"
}
}
}
Finally, you can check using the percolate query if the query you've just stored would match
GET /my_index/_search
{
"query" : {
"percolate" : {
"field" : "query",
"document" : {
"message" : "A new bonsai tree in the office"
}
}
}
}
So all you need to do is to only store the query (not the documents), and then you can use the percolate query to check if the documents would have been selected by the query you stored, without having to store the documents themselves.