handling both exact and partial search on the same search string - elasticsearch

Question

I want to define the schema which can tackle the partial as well as the exact search for the same search value.
The exact search should always return the "exact match", ES should not break the search string into tokens in this case.

Answer 1

For partial match data type of the property should be text and for exact it should be keyword. For having the feasibility to have both partial and exact search without having to index the data to different properties you can leverage using fields. What it does is that it helps to index same data into different ways.
So, lets say you want to index name of persons, and have the ability for partial and exact search. In such case the mapping would be:
PUT test
{
"mappings": {
"_doc": {
"properties": {
"name": {
"type": "text",
"fields": {
"keyword": {
"type": "keyword"
}
}
}
}
}
}
}
Lets index a few docs:
PUT test/_doc/1
{
"name": "Nishant Saini"
}
PUT test/_doc/2
{
"name": "Nishant Kumar"
}
For partial search we have to query name field and it is of type text.
GET test/_doc/_search
{
"query": {
"query_string": {
"query": "Nishant Saini",
"field": [
"name"
]
}
}
}
The above query will return both docs (1 and 2) because one token i.e. Nishant appears in both the document for field name.
For exact search we need to query on name.keyword. To perform exact match we can use term query as below:
{
"query": {
"term": {
"name.keyword": "Nishant Saini"
}
}
}
This would match doc 1 only.