How to perform search query on two different data types? - elasticsearch

Question

my query is very simple, for the sake of even making it simpler, lets say I only search on two fields, name(text) & age(long):
GET person_db/person/_search
{
"query": {
"bool": {
"should": [
{
"match_phrase_prefix": {
"name": "hank"
}
},
{
"match_phrase_prefix": {
"age": "hank"
}
}
],
"minimum_should_match": 1,
"boost": 1.0
}
}
}
if I search for "23", no problem, elastic knows how to change it to numeric and it won't fail, but if the search input is "john" I get error 400 "reason": "failed to create query: {\n \"bool\....".
what should I do in this case?
I thought of changing the values that are numeric to strings before insert to es, but trying to avoid it, I think es should have a way to support it.
appreciate it
This query works: (thanks to #jmlw)
{
"query": {
"bool": {
"should": [
{
"multi_match": {
"query": "alt",
"type": "phrase_prefix",
"fields": [
"name",
"taxid",
"providers.providerAddress.street"
],
"lenient": true
}
}
],
"minimum_should_match": 1,
"boost": 1.0
}
}
}

Answer 1

Without details of your documents, or your mappings, my first guess is that the age field is interpreted as a numeric field by Elasticsearch. Passing in anything other than a 'number' type, or something that can be converted into a number will cause the query to fail, with some exception reporting a failure to convert your string into a number.
With that said, you may try add ing lenient: true to your match_phrase_prefix search term, which will allow Elasticsearch to ignore failures to convert to a numeric type, and remove that term from the search.
Another approach is to only allow users to query on multiple fields of the same type, or specify what data they'd like to query in which field. I.E. I'm a user, and I want to search for people where age is 23, and have the name John, instead of typing in 23 John, or similar.
Otherwise, you may need to pre-process the query string, and split search terms and pass them into search clauses individually with lenient: true to attempt searching multiple terms in multiple fields with different data types.
You could also try using a different search type, like a multi_match, query_string, or simple_query_string as these will likely have more flexibility for what you are wanting to do.